In this performative gesture, multidisciplinary artist, activist and cultural worker, Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald engages in Kpelle dance as a practice of colonial resistance. This dance is a piece of her maternal Indigenous culture that she has been able to learn in the territory, because her people countered the endless attempts to destroy, flatten, and eliminate their ways of being. Kpelle dance is a manifestation of her people’s survival, and a technology of survival in itself, offering pathways towards what comes next. 

Kpelle dance is also central in Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald’s most recent performance I want revenge, grandma (2024) in which she investigated historical facts about the relationship between Germany and Liberia, serving as an example of the broader colonial relationship between Europe and Africa. She anchors certain realities to tell that story: the Bong Mines, a German mining project operating in Liberia from 1960-1990, and the brass ankle bracelets she saw in the Humboldt Forum when she first arrived in Berlin—one of many pieces of cultural heritage unjustly held in German museums. In her performance, she articulates on restitution, reparations, revenge and return to analyse the past while staying connected to concrete demands for the present and future.