UEW Hosts Transformative “De/Composing” Workshop: Reimagining Sankofa for a World in Crisis
The University of Education, Winneba (UEW) has hosted an artistic experiment that is reshaping how tradition and transformation are understood in contemporary practice.
As part of the Centre for Research, Culture and Creative Arts (CeRCCA) global conference on Sankofaism in Arts and Cultural Research, the New Futures Arts Collaborative led a two-day intensive workshop for art students.
Held on 26th and 27th March, 2026, the workshop, titled De/composing, challenged participants to rethink the popular Sankofa idea of returning to the past for wisdom. Rather than simple retrieval, the workshop posed a harder question: what must be allowed to decay before anything meaningful can be recovered?
Students from the Department of Art Education joined international facilitators in exploring embodied, process-driven practices. These methods encouraged co-creation, dialogue and experimentation in response to what organisers described as a time of global polycrisis.
The first phase, DE, focused on fire, fabric and the breaking down of symbols. Participants engaged in rituals of burning and release. They then reconstructed fragmented meanings through movement inspired by Adinkra symbols such as Nkyinkyim, Eban, Sankofa and Nnoboa. The second phase, COMPOSING, shifted to play. Students designed games from everyday materials, using creativity to question and reshape dominant narratives.
The outcomes were later presented in the exhibition Visual Arts as an Agent of Change in Times of Polycrisis, held on campus from 31st March to 2nd April, 2026. The exhibition featured burnt fabric transformed into new forms, fragmented symbols, video installations and interactive game stations. Visitors were invited to engage actively rather than observe passively.
Facilitators included Allan Charles Chipman, Isadora Canela, Elsa Cuissard, Kirimi Thuranira, Lukas Sterzenbach and David Anderson Hooker. UEW’s Agnes Onumah and Ngugi Waweru of Kenya also played key roles in facilitating the workshop.
Local coordination was led by Patrique deGraft-Yankson, Ebenezer Acquah, Nyamewero Navei, Ebenezer Kow Abraham and Wilberforce Sarpong. Their role ensured that international approaches remained grounded in Ghanaian visual culture.
Speaking after the event, Isadora Canela and Elsa Cuissard stressed that the process was collaborative, not imported. They noted that Ghanaian philosophies such as Sankofa and Nnoboa were not new, but were reactivated to confront current global challenges. Ebenezer Kow Abraham added that Sankofa must be “inhabited as movement,” not reduced to metaphor.
CeRCCA and UEW expressed appreciation to all contributors, describing the workshop as a meaningful exchange that bridged local knowledge and global artistic enquiry.
