Julianknxx’s work is not fixed – it moves. His work traverses geographies, languages, and gestures, building an archive in transit where each voice resonates as part of a large choir. To think of his work is to think directly of the cultural roots of West Africa, especially Sierra Leone, where the artist comes from. In his films, installations, and performances, the artist does not seek out a single testimony, but a fabric of memories and presences that escapes colonial narratives. His gaze does not collect, but listens.

The notion of displacement is constantly present. The sea, harbor cities, bodies waiting or in transit – they all run through his work like traces of a past that has never stopped moving. The ocean is not just a setting, but a character: a liquid archive that holds traumas and possibilities, that erases traces and, at the same time, transports them. Europe, in his philosophy, is not a fixed space, but an unstable landscape where Black bodies reinvent what it means to belong.

Julianknxx is as interested in the history of the world as he is in the everyday history of the people who comprise it, an interest that forms the backdrop to his narrative. The choir, the spoken word, the performance that becomes matter – the artist understands music as resistance, but also as a trace of something greater: the sound of those who have never stopped moving. His work is part of the oral tradition of a living Africa and leads us to the following question: What does it mean to belong to a place when places are always intersected by other stories?

Writing poems is a fundamental part of his creative process, a tool that not only underpins his work, but the way he articulates his experiences and observes the realities of the world, transforming fragments of memory into new forms of resistance. His practice challenges the hierarchies of the Western archive, transforming listening through a radical method and fragmentation in terms of form. What matters is not only what is said, but also the silence that warns: tiredness can also be resistance.

Julianknxx proposes radical listening. In his work, the past and the present brush up against each other, and history is not revealed as a static account, but as something that pulses, that is remade at every turn. At the crossroads of art and politics, his images and sounds remind us that our stories were never just the colonial narratives we were told – they are also what we keep singing, even when no one seems to be listening.