Nachbar - Nomade Presence Out of Place

In the organizer's words:

The SPÄTI in the Humboldt Forum opens every two weeks on Fridays in the large foyer and offers the obligatory drinks, talks and music. Here, artists give insights into their work, DJs play new and historical tracks and designers present innovative designs.

SPÄTI is a small stage for the unfinished, unusual concepts and unplanned gatherings - without registration and free of charge.

On January 30, poet Logan February invites you to Nachbar - Nomade: Presence Out of Place, an afternoon of readings, talks and music with young Berlin voices from West and Central Africa. Interdisciplinary poet and artist hn. lyonga shares his visions of community, cuisine and care, while queer activist Matthew Blaise introduces the Obodo Nigeria Foundation and its artist program. They will be accompanied by a DJ set by mokeyanju.

PARTICIPANTS

Logan February is a Nigerian poet and multidisciplinary artist. February's work explores desire, psychospirituality and Afro-queer identity. February's poetry books include "In The Nude" (Ouida Poetry, 2019) and "Mental Voodoo" (Poesie Dekolonie/Engeler Verlag, 2024). The short film "Thrall" was part of the official selection at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2025. February received the Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature and scholarships from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program, the Berlin Senate Department for Culture, the Literaturhaus Wien and the Akademie der Künste, among others. Logan February is currently Poet in Residence at the Humboldt Forum and lives in Berlin.

Matthew Blaise is a Nigerian cultural practitioner and arts-based researcher whose work addresses issues of sexuality, public culture and social change in contemporary Nigeria. He is the Executive Director of Obodo Nigeria, a youth-led arts and culture organization working at the intersection of creative practice, research, technology and community-based advocacy to support queer lifestyles and narratives. Through Obodo, Matthew has led interdisciplinary programs that foreground art as a site of political imagination, care, and collective world-making.

His work is informed by his ongoing engagement in grassroots activism and digital mobilization, including participation in national movements such as #EndSARS, #QueerLivesMatter and #EndHomophobiaInNigeria, which brought renewed attention to police violence, structural exclusion and the intersections of sexuality, citizenship and state power. Rather than focusing solely on activism, Matthew critically examines how public discourse, media and cultural production shape political subjectivities, particularly for young queer Nigerians navigating a hostile legal and social environment.

Matthew's contributions to arts, culture and social justice have been recognized through several international awards including the MTV EMAs Generation Change Award (2022), SOGIESC Activist of the Year (2021) and nominations for the Future Awards Africa (2020) in the Leading Conversations category. His work has been featured in international publications such as Vogue, Bloomberg and TIME, and he has contributed to global debates as a speaker and panelist at platforms such as AfricaNXT, Women Deliver 2023 and the ILGA World Conference. He is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Human Rights at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) in Germany, where his academic work reflects a growing research interest in cultural rights, counter-publics and the role of art under conditions of criminalization and social marginalization.

hn. lyonga is a Black, queer, cross-genre writer, poet and curator at the intersection of postcolonial literature, critical race theory and social transformation, with an interest in anti-Black racism, language in Black speculative fiction, anti-colonial approaches to nature and the fixing of land as infrastructure. hn. lyonga currently coordinates BARAZANI.berlin - Forum Colonialism and Resistance and is a member of the FieldNarratives collective.

mokeyanju (Jumoke Adeyanju) is an interdisciplinary sound artist, multilingual writer, dancer and vinyl collector based in Berlin. She is the founder of "The Poetry Meets... Series" and hosts her own radio show "Sauti ya àkókò" on Refuge Worldwide.

- free of charge

- Language: English

- Location: Mechanical arena in the foyer

- Part of: SPÄTI

- Belongs to: Relationship family