Territorial Bodies Exhibition: Interview with the Artist. Vivian Ngozi Aghamelu.
After being part of Territorial Bodies exhibition, curated by Marcela Villanueva, Vivian Ngozi Aghamelu reflects on her art in an interview with Myriam Martínez Gómez.
Who is Vivian Ngozi Aghamelu?
I describe myself as an interdisciplinary artist. I’m also trained in drama therapy and in theatre education, and that definitely plays a role in my artistic work. I’ve been exploring filmmaking, now I am into performing and costume making, but I decide which medium I use depending on what I want to tell. So far, I’ve been quite experimental with my approaches, but it’s also important that my art is accessible and relatable to a wide range of people, even though I’m mostly talking about my own identity-related issues.
What is your creative process?
My work always starts from personal experience. While developing “Hair Stories”, part of the “Territorial Bodies” exhibition, curated by Marcela Villanueva and presented at Bardo Projektraum, I was going through a difficult period, financially and emotionally. I’d look at myself in the mirror every day and feel dissatisfied with how I looked, especially my hair. But I didn’t have the means to go to a hairdresser or afford extensions. It was a moment of rebellion, and I decided, “I’m just going to cut it”. That personal decision became a starting point to reflect on larger structural issues.
Hair, particularly for black people, holds so much social and cultural weight. In Berlin, there are very few hairdressers who know how to properly stylish our hair, and are often extremely expensive. The same goes for hair products; it can take 20 or 30 different items just to try and achieve what’s considered “perfect” curls. There’s so much pressure tied to appearance, beauty standards and eurocentric norms. Is exhausting.
This experience made me think more broadly: Why do we see certain hair textures or styles as beautiful or not? And how is that connected to race, gender, and representation? When I cut off my hair, as someone perceived as a women, I received comments like: “I don’t like that look on women”, which brings in another layer of gendered expectations. So I started to explore the stigmatization of hair and identity, and how these personal struggles are actually rooted in wider systems of inequality.
It’s always like that?
That’s usually how my creative process unfolds. For example, in a performance I did in Nigeria, I explored my experience of navigating identity as a mixed raced person: how I’m perceived across cultures and where I feel I belong. Sharing that publicly led to a meaningful conversation with someone who related deeply to what I expressed. That connection turned into a collaboration, where we explored the shared roots of our experiences, and how is it commented to: colonial continuities, white supremacy and patriarchy.
For my upcoming performance in June 28, at 100° Diaspora, I’m starting again from a personal place: this time, grief. It’s also about reconnecting with my roots and exploring how, as someone from the diaspora, I can build a relationship with my ancestry. And again, this process has already led to someone else reaching out with a shared experience. So for me, it always begins with a personal life event or a challenge or anything that I am going through at the moment. The idea is to not isolate my experiences, but seeing the structural forces connected to them. It’s about seeing the structural forces behind it, and creating space for collaboration, connection and collective reflection.
Your art is intentionally political, then?
The question of what is political is a huge one. I feel that my personal experiences are always political, and that makes my work political, without having to directly name and point out that my work is political. It’s about keeping deconstructing that and being sensitive or sensible about how those things come together and affect me, but also other people.
And how do you broaden your vision?
Research is a big part of my process too. When I was working on the theme of hair, it was largely conversational. Those personal exchanges were really valuable in shaping the work. For my upcoming performance in June, my research has taken a different direction. I’ve been watching documentaries on ancestral knowledge and traditional African religions, and looking at how these belief systems were demonized through Christianization and Islamization. That’s been a powerful lens for understanding cultural loss and spiritual resistance.
At the same time, I’ve been reading books focused on decolonial approaches to mental health, particularly how healing can look different outside of Western frameworks. I’m also diving into African-American literature that explores emotions like love and rage. And how rage, in particular, can be a source of power and resilience, rather than just something destructive.
Lately, I’ve been engaging more deeply with somatic practices, decolonial thinking, and pre-colonial African philosophies too. I’m trying to find ways to weave all of this together, to create something that speaks to the body, the mind, the spirit, and the history we carry.
The physicality is central to your work.
Yes, definitely. It’s about embodying change, not only talking about it or reading or looking at it. It helps to internalize new experiences. If it’s just an intellectual process, there can be a huge disconnection.
So within my art, and also in my empowerment workshops, I mostly focus on this connection with your own body. What you feel and what are your resources to change things, so you can feel self-agency and have some sort of control. Especially us marginalized people, we can feel very anxious and very hopeless and helpless. It’s important to remind to ouselves: “there are a few things that I can be intentional about, where I have a choice and where I feel I have power of my own life”.
You’re a performer too.
Yes. The two years I spent at university were actually quite challenging for me in terms of feeling comfortable in my body, especially in public or performative spaces. I often felt anxious and insecure about being physically present in those contexts.
Now there’s more mental and emotional space to explore my body as a source of strength and expression. I’m starting to find more comfort in that presence. The videos I’ve created so far were, in a way, a compromise: a way to continue performing while still feeling safe. Behind the screen, I have control. I can edit, decide how things are shown, and shape the experience in a way that feels manageable.
But performing live is a different kind of exposure. You’re exposed to the immediate gaze of others, which can be intimidating, but also really powerful and energizing. Now that I’m no longer in that academic environment, I feel more ready to take that risk and embrace live performance. In fact, I’m planning to perform in the costume on May 18th, at Kottilesbe des Monats stepping more fully into that space of presence and embodiment.
How did “Hair Stories” came to fruiction?
It really just started from a simple impulse: As an artist and in terms of archiving, I decided do document my experiences in different spaces, processes, sparks and my personal journeys either in forms of text journeling, audio or video recordings. So I began documenting what I was doing. Then, completely by chance, two of my friends, both Black Afro-German women, told me they were also thinking about shaving their heads. I thought, “what if this could be part of a shared art project?” So that’s how the video and monologues came together. It all grew very organically from that moment of shared vulnerability and curiosity.
Once I had this material, I started thinking more deeply about what I wanted to say with it. Themes like beauty standards, hair and body hair began to emerge, especially within the context of Black identity. I noticed how, even in Afro-American pop culture, we still see very narrow, polished representations of Black women: often with straightened or non-natural hair, completely shaved bodies, almost doll-like appearances. And I started asking myself whose gaze is this really catering to.
That reflection became a central point in my work, questioning the beauty ideals we’ve inherited and internalized, even within our own communities. I wanted to challenge those norms. Could I still be seen as beautiful, sexy, or powerful without head hair and with visible body hair? That contrast became a playful but critical part of the project.
As for the installation format, I always knew I wanted to create the costume. The opportunity for it to become something larger came when I approached Fortuna Wetten during the 48 Hours Neukölln festival. I asked if there was space to exhibit, and they offered me a large room. That moment opened up the possibility to scale the project.
I was also fortunate to receive funding from my university, which allowed me to turn the idea into a full installation. Without that support, I wouldn’t have been able to print the photographs or pay the photographer, videographer or the composer for the performance video. It was the combination of initiative, community and support what really made the whole thing possible.
Why did you decided to show both photos and video?
There’s kind of a dramaturgy in their synergie. The performance video is more of an outside perspective. I majorly don’t wear the wig, I just show my shaved head, and it’s more playful, too. The photos have more elements, like the staff that I created with the mirror handle. I imagined myself standing in a queue alongside different versions of myself, creating a vibey, atmospheric space; almost like a personal sanctuary where I feel safe and at ease with my body and identity. Wearing the wig allows me to tap into a specific character; it’s a creative resource I draw from, and it’s deeply rooted in our culture as well.
Regarding the light used, the blue and the red, I shared a mood board with the photographer. So I would say it was both my inspiration, but she brought it to life.
You also did a workshop, “Creative Writing, Screening, and Conversation: Hair Stories“, at Bardo Projektraum.
Yes. Usually, I lead empowerment workshops for the BIPoC and queer community and kids who are affected by racism. But I wanted to take people on my creative journey somehow. I wanted to use my artistic approach to keep exploring the fact that we all have a history with hair. So there’s a mutual source, a connection. And since Bardo Projektraum is a space open to uplift disident voices, it was the perfect opportunity.
I brought different items that are mostly tied to my own identity and to hair. The goal was to see what they might evoke: maybe personal memories, stories from childhood or upbringing. It was really about creating a space for sharing. Then, through writing, we would express those stories.
From the stories we shared, we would extract keywords that everyone could access and use to create their own texts. So it became not just about my story, but a collective one. If someone felt inspired by something I said, they were welcome to use it for their own piece. And then we would share again. It was all about holding space for our personal histories while also weaving them into something communal and connected.
Why did you choose to use writing to approach that topic?
I think that has to do with my therapeutic background. Just because I love to perform doesn’t mean that everyone who comes to my workshops feels comfortable performing. Through my own decolonial journey, I’ve realized that people enter spaces with very different capacities and resources. So, I try to make the space as low-threshold and safe as possible (especially since it was only two hours, which is quite short).
I’ve found that writing is often more accessible for many people. I know that even for myself, when I enter a new space with people I don’t know, I don’t immediately feel comfortable performing or exposing myself. I need to first feel the room, get a sense of who I’m with, and build a bit of trust. That’s why everything in the workshop is voluntary, people can decide whether or not they want to share their texts.
So this is where my therapeutic self comes in: being mindful of my own approach, my own resources, and understanding that the participants might come from very different places. The aim isn’t to center my ego or make it all about me. I want to offer something of myself that others can take and make their own.
When I was studying, we often had to create short, personal theater pieces, five to ten minutes, where we worked through personal themes and transformed them into performance. That background, along with exposure to various techniques, really shaped how I approach this work. I find drama therapy and art therapy incredibly compelling. They engage different parts of the self: it’s not just about talking, it’s embodied. How someone moves, or how they inhabit a space, can reveal so much about how they feel outside of that space, too.
That’s why I approach workshops with care. It can get very deep, even intense, especially for people who are sensitive or carry a lot. So for me, it’s always about finding that balance, creating something stabilizing, not overwhelming. It’s nuanced work, and I try to hold it responsibly. There’s already a kind of emotional and mental management happening, even before anything is said or done. It’s a quiet labor that often goes unnoticed, but it’s very real, especially when it’s open to everyone. Even if I’m in a space full of kind, politically aware white people, there’s still this automatic reaction, like, “okay, am I safe here?” It brings up a lot of memories and past experiences. It’s that initial instinct to scan the room and wonder if someone might say something, maybe not out of malice, but out of ignorance.
What do you see in your future?
I think in the future I’ll probably do less photography, but I’ll definitely continue exploring video, costume-making and performance. I also like the idea of doing street performances, since I’ve been seen less and less of it here in Berlin in the recent years. We are experiencing a huge violation of freedom of speech right now on Germany. The need for diverse political action is very high, and because of the political climate, we have to find smart ways to still speak up and to connect and resist together. So, in the future I want to work more on street performances to reach more people, outside of my bubble to have these kind of conversations about colonial continuities and heritage and to also reflect on possibilities for resistance that are individually accessible.
For the performance I’ll be doing in June, I’m creating a new costume, actually. And if possible, I’d like to include a projection element as well. This ties back to what I mentioned earlier: depending on the story I want to tell, I think about how I can bring different media together to build that narrative.
It’s a bit like a collage, but not just visually, more like layering elements to deepen the meaning. I don’t see these practices as separate or just sitting next to each other. I combine them in a way that adds value to what I want to express. For me, it’s not just about aesthetics; I want people to understand the story behind it, where it comes from, the history that informs it.
So your art will continue to evolve in different directions.
Technique-wise, I keep exploring new mediums, like for example street performance (I’ve noticed there’s been less and less in Berlin through the years). But I think that the most important part is that now I use art to support myself, to find resilience and healing. I’m using the tools I have learned to actually help other people, too. They can relate and connect with the topics I work with, and it’s also a way for me to not feel isolated.
My work is very process-oriented. The final outcome matters, but what happens during its creation is just as important to me. For example, the costume I made for “Hair Stories”, came about after I shaved my head. That experience made me reflect on my relationship with hair and how I feel in my body overall. So I decided to create a very seductive costume that incorporated my own hair, turning something personal into a piece of art.
Filming myself wearing the costume later was both challenging and empowering. Growing up, I struggled with body image and self-expression, especially during my teenage years. I know many people go through similar experiences, but I felt it was important to start by focusing on myself to open up the conversation from a place of honesty.
Myriam Martínez Gómez
