LISTENING SETTING: Before listening to Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s essay please obtain a small handful of soil from where plants or trees grow and hold it. After listening to the essay, add to your thoughts the fact that soil is home to many insects, bacteria, fungal cells and nematodes. These living things are different from each other but interdependent, an example of multispecies collaboration not visible to the human eye. Soil is a “local” where our world is (most often) in balance, thus it is a community that thrives while not dominated by a canon.

    DESCRIPTION: Ndking’s essay proposes "a global museum of self-reflexivity, whereby the idea will not be to create new or parallel canons, or place them side by side, or universalize the Western canon, but to decanonize the entire notion of the canon.”
(originally published in Mousse Magazine #58, April–May 2017)
Essay read by Desire Kaniki.

    BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (born in 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon), is an independent curator, author and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and the artistic director of sonsbeek20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Ndikung was the curator-at-large for Adam Szymczyk's Documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany in 2017; a guest curator of the Dak’Art biennale in Dakar, Senegal, in 2018; and the artistic director of the 12th Bamako Encounters photography biennial in Mali last year. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and was a guest professor in curatorial studies and sound art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He is currently a professor in the Spatial Strategies MA program at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin and is also a recipient of the first OCAD University International Curators Residency fellowship in Toronto in 2020.

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