Neighbour - Nomade Presence Out of Place

SPÄTI is a small stage for the unfinished, unusual concepts, and unplanned encounters— no registration required and free of charge.

On January 30, poet Logan February invites you to Neighbour – Nomad: Presence Out of Place, an afternoon of readings, conversations and music with young Berlin-based voices from West and Central Africa. Interdisciplinary poet and artist hn. lyonga shares their visions of community, kitchens and care, alongside queer activist Matthew Blaise presenting the Obodo Nigeria Foundation and its artist program, all musically accompanied by DJ mokeyanju.

PARTICIPANTS

Logan February is a Nigerian poet and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores desire, psychospirituality, and Afro-queer identity. Their poetry collections include In The Nude (Ouida Poetry, 2019) and Mental Voodoo (Poesie Dekolonie/Engeler Verlag, 2024). Their short film, Thrall, was an official selection at the 2025 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. February received the Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature and recent fellowships from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, the Berlin Senate Department for Culture, Literaturhaus Wien, and Akademie der Künste, among others. Presently a poet-in-residence at the Humboldt Forum, Logan February lives in Berlin.

Matthew Blaise is a Nigerian cultural worker and arts-based researcher whose practice engages questions of sexuality, public culture, and social transformation 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 lives 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 sustained engagement with grassroots organizing 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 centering activism alone, Matthew’s practice critically examines how public discourse, media, and cultural production shape political subjectivities, particularly for young queer Nigerians navigating hostile legal and social environments.
Matthew’s contributions to arts, culture, and social justice have been recognized through several international honors, including the MTV EMAs Generation Change Award (2022), SOGIESC Activist of the Year (2021), and nominations for The Future Awards Africa (2020) for Leading Conversations. His work has been featured in international publications such as Vogue, Bloomberg, and TIME, and he has contributed to global conversations as a speaker and panelist at platforms including AfricaNXT, Women Deliver 2023, and the ILGA World Conference. He is currently completing a Master’s degree in Human Rights at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) in Germany, where his academic work reflects a growing research interest in cultural rights, counterpublics, and the role of art in conditions of criminalization and social marginalization.

hn. lyonga is a Black, queer, gender-fluid writer, poet, and curator working 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 fixation on 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 and is living in Berlin. She is the founder of ‘The Poetry Meets… Series’ and hosts her own radio show “Sauti ya àkókò” on Refuge Worldwide.

- free admission
- English
- Mechanical Arena in the Foyer
- Part of: SPÄTI
- Belongs to: Family Matters