Derick Armah

Heritage + Culture

Drawing on deep listening practices to tend to collective histories with care, creating works that engage the senses and activate memory.

My work considers the politics and poetics of listening – listening to the embodied self in relation to place; questioning whose voices are listened to, and whose voices are positioned as noise under social-political-historical paradigms. Through this mode of research and creation, I honour the subjective experience as essential records of our complex societies, as felt and remembered by people and communities.

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 examination of the interplay between person and place in a historical context, an interest that’s since extended across my work in different mediums.

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 – feel free to get in contact if you’d like to discuss a project.

Please use the site menu to navigate to examples of my work.

Photograph by Ivan d’Avoine, 35mm film.