The Fire Last Time… is a research-based artistic project that reengages the First World War in East Africa through speculative, decolonial inquiry. Building on the artist’s long-term work on the erasure of African histories from dominant European war narratives, the project shifts focus from the war itself to the forms of resistance, knowledge, and life that existed before its devastation. Through fieldwork in Tanzania, the research traces ‘more-than-human’ witnesses – landscapes, plants, infrastructures, and materials – alongside oral histories and community testimony. By weaving ecological, material, and human narratives, the project seeks to construct a pluriversal archive that challenges colonial epistemologies and recentres African ways of knowing history, memory, and survival. The research will form the conceptual basis for a future video and sound-based work.
Kathleen Bomani is a Berlin-based artist and researcher whose practice examines colonial memory, African histories, and speculative forms of resistance through performance, sound, and moving image.
