When the Ledger Speaks: On Building a Table of Our Own

The question Platform 011 poses – When does Global Majority describe an existing condition and when does it begin to produce one? – is a Trojan horse, and I mean that as a compliment to whoever wrote it. It arrives dressed as a neutral inquiry into terminology, but smuggled inside that inquiry is an argument that these two functions – describing an existing condition and producing one – were never actually separable. 

Descriptively, the term ‘Global Majority’ insists that a majority already exists: most of the world’s people, most of its historical inheritance, most of its future demographic weight sits outside the small cluster of nations that have spent centuries speaking as though they were the world’s centre.

Performatively, the term does something else entirely. It helps assemble the language and the consciousness through which that majority can act, together, as a unified political category, rather than remain a statistical fact scattered across continents with no shared table to sit at. My practice lives in the friction between those two functions. I am less interested in choosing one than in metabolising the tension between them into something artists and cultural institutions can actually build with.

I use the word ‘metabolise’ here, rather than resolve. A resolved tension goes quiet. A metabolised one keeps producing energy. What I have intended to build across two decades of institution-making is precisely that kind of engine: an infrastructure that treats Global Majority not as an identity to be illustrated but as a table to be built, plank by plank, by the people the term claims to describe, and on terms those people set for themselves.

Building our own table is not a metaphor I reach for lightly. It names a specific refusal. For a long time, the available strategy for African and diasporic cultural producers seeking recognition was to seek a seat at an existing table, one already set, with its own menu, its own seating chart, its own quiet rules about who speaks first and who is expected to perform gratitude for the invitation. That strategy produces visibility. It rarely produces power, because the table remains someone else’s, and the terms of inclusion remain theirs to revoke. The alternative, the one I have spent my working life pursuing, is to build new tables entirely, staffed and set by the Global Majority itself, connected to one another directly rather than routed through the historical centres that have long claimed the exclusive right to authenticate what counts as significant culture.

That refusal carries its own risk, and I don’t think this essay should elide it. A new table is still a table. Decisions still have to be made about who sits where, whose language sets the terms of conversation, whose work counts as central and whose is treated as illustrative. Building infrastructure outside the old centres does not automatically democratise who benefits from it. It can just as easily produce a new set of gatekeepers, a new hierarchy of biennials, prizes, and patrons who happen to be African or diasporic rather than European, but who reproduce the same logic of scarcity and exception the old table ran on. Asking who gets invited to the table, who sets its terms, and who doesn’t have a seat after it has been built, is not a hostile question to ask about a project such as this. It is the question that keeps the project honest. 

This is where the project Dig Where You Stand: From Coast to Coast shows its face. Dig Where You Stand is a series of travelling exhibitions initiated by me and the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), Lagos. The first iteration opened in September 2022 at the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art in Tamale, Ghana. It has since been presented in Lomé (2023), Lisbon (2024), Ouidah and Cotonou (2024), Lagos (2024), Abidjan (2025), and continues in 2026 in Dakar. Each iteration is shaped by its host city and leaves behind a toolkit for local regenerative economic practice. I want to be careful here not to narrate it as a list of cities visited, because that would miss the point entirely. The project is not a travelling showcase of grievance; it is an experiment in reversing the direction resources and authority have historically flowed. Where the colonial model extracts raw and cultural materials from the African continent and processes it into value elsewhere, Dig Where You Stand insists that the processing itself, the exhibition-making, the publishing, the market-building, happens on African ground, in coastal cities that once anchored the ships that enabled the human lives, natural resources, and wealth to flow out Africa. This is not restitution understood as an apology issued from a position of guilt. It is regeneration, understood as a claim on the future rather than a settlement of the past. A project built on trauma asks to be seen and pitied. A project built on building power asks to be resourced and joined. None of this guarantees the redistribution it aims for, though. A travelling exhibition still depends on funders, ministries, and a biennial-adjacent circuit of attention that has its own hierarchies, and I hold open the possibility that even a project built to reverse the historical and ongoing legacies of extraction can end up reproducing the market logic and philanthropic gatekeeping it set out to work against. Naming that risk does not resolve it but it is part of what the project has to keep testing against itself.

Curating Benin’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024, titled Everything Precious Is Fragile, put the same instinct under more pressure, in more than one sense. A national pavilion is, inescapably, a part of the biennial and nation-state system. This system – with its hierarchy of countries, commissioners, and juries – predates those who engage with it and does not dissolve simply because a new nation is finally admitted into it. In working inside that system, rather than refusing it outright, I wagered that its infrastructure could be redirected from within. This required working against the pavilion’s own internal logic. The customary strategy for a debut pavilion is to back one artist with every available resource, a solo bet dressed up as a national statement. We rejected that logic from the outset. What we built instead was closer to a single cake made from four distinct ingredients, each artist contributing something the others could not supply, so the whole reads as one cohesive argument without needing a single figure to carry it. The pavilion did not need a hero. It needed four practices willing to bake something together.

Romuald Hazoumè’s contribution set the tone before a visitor had read a single wall text. His central structure, built from blackened petrol jerry cans and lit low with a narrow entrance just enough to make visitors bow their heads, functioned less as an object to look at than as a room to be inside. Fragrance moved through the space alongside a choral soundtrack, and the effect was closer to a sanctuary than an exhibit: a room built specifically to slow visitors down, to interrupt the shuffling pace the Bienniale usually imposes, and to let something like care register in the body before it registered in the mind. Restoring that kind of attentiveness, before any argument had even been made in words, was itself part of the argument.

Moufouli Bello’s paintings did something adjacent from a different angle. Her large-format portraits of Black women, rendered almost entirely in the indigo she associates with benevolence and home, stood beside a small library she assembled herself, its shelves holding work exclusively by Black women writers from across the world, their texts moving between languages the way the pavilion itself moved between epistemologies. The library was not an illustration of the paintings’ themes. It was a second, quieter argument about how knowledge actually travels between women, rarely through the formal channels a Western institution would recognise as scholarship, and far more often through exactly the kind of informal transmission Bello’s own practice draws from: women braiding each other’s hair, mothers and daughters and grandmothers passing down what no lawyer’s training or art history degree would think to record. Placing that transmission inside a biennale pavilion was a claim that this informal, embodied mode of knowledge deserved the same seriousness as anything printed and peer reviewed. It functioned, in its own register, as an act of epistemic return, bringing a form of authority to voices that the world’s cataloguing systems had never thought to catalogue.

Chloé Quenum’s contribution addressed a different register of the same brief. The pavilion was staged inside the Arsenale, the complex that was for centuries the largest industrial site in pre-modern Europe – the shipyard and armoury where the Venetian Republic built the vessels and arms that projected its power outward. Quenum’s piece, a full-scale glass reconstruction of one of the Arsenale’s own windows, placed to face the original, understood exactly what kind of room it was standing in. Suspended between the real window and its ghostly double hung a set of blown-glass instruments, replicas of Fon, Yoruba, and Bariba objects once played in the Amazone processions in the Kingdom of Dahomey and long held, silent, in a Parisian museum’s storage. The piece did not illustrate loss. It staged a confrontation between a room built to manufacture weapons and a set of instruments built to make music, asking the Arsenale to look at its own reflection and reckon with what standing on this ground has always meant.

What binds these three contributions together, and what the photography of the fourth artist, Ishola Akpo, extended further still, is the philosophy the whole brief was built around. Gèlèdè tradition centres on rematriation, a feminist reading of restitution that insists the most urgent thing displaced by colonial and capitalist expansion was not only objects but a principle: the authority, tenderness, and ecological equilibrium once held by women within Beninese and wider Yoruba cosmology. The custodians I consulted while developing the pavilion were direct about this. The world feels out of kilter, they told me, because women were displaced from their traditional role of power and balance, and a great deal of what now passes for progress – extraction dressed as development, domination dressed as strength – follows directly from that displacement. I don’t read this as nostalgia for a lost matriarchal past. I read it as a proposal for what to build next: an infrastructure of care, softness, and interdependence positioned not as a sentimental counterweight to hard power but as a form of life and politics to be deliberately reconstructed rather than mourned.

Held together – a sanctuary built from petrol cans, a library built from indigo and testimony, a mirror held up to a weapons factory – none of this resolves into a single lesson, and I feel that declination is the point. A pavilion that only confronted hard power would risk becoming another exhibition of grievance. A pavilion that only proposed softness would risk becoming decorative, easily absorbed, and forgotten. Holding both together, letting confrontation and repair sit in the same room without collapsing into each other, is what I mean by metabolising a tension rather than resolving it.

This is also why I resist any account of Global Majority solidarity organised around a specific identity group defending a fixed position. That framing keeps the conversation trapped in a defensive posture, a minority position perpetually proving its worth to a majority it does not control. What interests me is the production of new frames by entering a social conversation and changing what can be said and thought within the existing frames, regardless of who is speaking. Solidarity, understood this way, is not primarily about who belongs to the Global Majority as a demographic category. It is about the frames, networks, shared vocabularies that different constituencies build together, intentionally, so that positions previously illegible to one another become mutually intelligible and capable of coordinated action. Building those frames is the labour. The category follows the labour.

None of this happens through illustration, and none of it is guaranteed by good intentions. There is a mode of cultural production, still common, that stops at representing a condition, showing suffering, showing marginality, showing the fact of exclusion, and trusting that the showing itself constitutes an intervention. My interest has always been in what comes after the showing: institutions, markets, publishing platforms, and exhibition models robust enough to move actual resources, actual authority, actual continuity of practice across the networks that a shared consciousness makes visible. This is the move from performance to action, from a politics staged for an audience assumed to be elsewhere to a politics that builds the material means by which the Global Majority can act together, for itself, in direct relation with constituencies across the Global Majority rather than always through a Western intermediary who authenticates the exchange. But infrastructure is not innocent simply because it is ours. It can redistribute power, or it can reproduce, in new hues, the same hierarchies of biennials, markets, nation-states, and philanthropic capital it was built to challenge. What kind of infrastructure it becomes is not settled in advance; it is settled, unevenly and never permanently, by those who sit at the table once it is finally built.

This is, I feel, precisely what arts and culture are able to do that other fields struggle to manage. Economics can describe demographic majorities. Policy can, occasionally, redistribute resources towards them. But the work of producing a shared political consciousness, of building frames through which disparate constituencies recognise a common project without collapsing their differences into a single identity, is closer to the work of exhibition-making than to either economics or policy. It requires holding contradiction rather than resolving it, sustaining a tension between what already exists and what has yet to be built, and doing that work in public, repeatedly, until the tension itself becomes generative rather than paralysing.

I want to end, though, not on the table itself but on what it leaves unaccounted. If building infrastructure is what turns a demographic majority into a political category capable of acting, then the same act that produces the category also produces its edges, and someone always ends up standing on the wrong side of them: an artist whose practice does not translate easily into an exhibition format; a community too small, too rural, too far from an airport to be reached by any of the networks I have described; a national pavilion system that, however redirected from within, still requires a passport and a ministry willing to sponsor the application. If building our own table is what produces the Global Majority as a political condition, the honest question to ask is not only who it brings in, but who and what are left outside.

So now to return to the Trojan horse–framing question I rode in on. Global Majority is already a fact of demography and history. It is also, and just as importantly, a category still being built – table by table, network by network – by institutions willing to connect the Global Majority to itself without routing that connection through its historical centres of authentication, and willing to keep asking, of their own tables, who is still left unseated. Staying inside that double truth, and inside that open question, rather than collapsing either into a settled answer, is where the real labour lives.