Performing Back is an artistic engagement with the continuity of Germany’s colonial past. The centre of the performance is constituted by Simone Dede Ayivi’s meticulous search for traces in the seemingly unremarkable cityscape between motorway and swan pond. Accompanied by the voices of Black German activists and creative artists, she travels to the sites of former human zoos, colonial monuments and colonial street formations, chronicles resistance and visions, offers outlooks and retrospection.

In a compilation of past, present, and future artefacts, hegemonic processes of historiography are called into question, colonial and racist imageries are deconstructed, ultimately inventing a new, post-colonial aesthetic.