When you are African, you speak to a world that has an existing view of who and what you are. You walk with this kind of label. So for me, the Bienna… - Lesley Lokko

I think all cultural output is a form of narrative. Somebody once said that culture is the sum total of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. So, there's a very deep need to say something, to impart something. In these questions of colony, identity, territory, and history, there is a sense amongst many black practitioners that we've never had the space to tell our own stories, and part of the act of recuperating what has been lost is the desire to speak. In some senses, the Biennale has been a healing experience, a kind of closing over of a wound, of a void.

Succession is something you make, by constructing opportunities.

The dominant voice has historically been a singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swathes of humanity — financially, creatively, conceptually — as though we have been listening and speaking in one tongue only.