Derick Armah
Heritage + Culture
Drawing on deep listening practices and academic training to interrogate collective histories with care and creativity, creating works that engage the senses and activate memory.
Finishing from SOAS, University of London with a BA History degree, I wrote a dissertation that examined British citizenship not only as a legal definition, but as a lived, embodied experience, and contoured by the particular political geographies of the 20th century. Titled African Subjects Resident in the United Kingdom in the Post-war Era: A Liminal Group Suspended Between the British Empire and African Nation, this was my first instance of investigating the interplay between person and place in a historical context, an interest that’s since extended across my work in different mediums.
My practice engages with the politics and poetics of listening. This means listening in its most literal sense, to sound, but also to images, and listening to the embodied self too. Ultimately, I honour the subjective when handling collective histories – as records of our complex societies, felt and remembered by people and communities. I’ve worked across oral history projects, with poetry, with photography and within museums and other cultural institutions.
I continue to research and create across a range of forms – please get in contact if you’d like to discuss a project.
Photograph by Ivan d’Avoine, 35mm film.