Te Ara Moana Moves
I want revenge, grandma
Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald
About the work
I want revenge, grandma investigates the colonial relationship between Liberia and Germany, using it as an entry point into understanding the broader structure of European domination across Africa. This performance is sensorial, layered, and intentionally unsettling, inviting audiences to confront the weight of history and the ongoing realities shaped by centuries of extraction and violence. Colleen Ndemeh guides viewers through acts of remembering, questioning, and breaking open the past, encouraging a direct engagement with stories that institutions have often buried in archives or vitrines. Using her framework of the 4 R’s, which are restitution, reparations, revenge, and return, she examines colonial histories while grounding the work in present day demands for justice. Drawing from her Kpelle heritage, she activates cultural memory as a tool for imagining new futures. I want revenge, grandma asks what becomes possible after generations of harm and what accountability might look like today.
About the artist
Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald
Liberia/Germany
Colleen Ndemeh is a multidisciplinary performance artist, activist and cultural worker of Kpelle (Liberian) and Irish-American descent. Her work is movement-based and centers on women of the African diaspora, as well as her feminist, antiracist and anticolonial politics. She has trained extensively in Afro-diasporic, West African and Contemporary dance techniques, including forms such as Guinean, Kpelle, Sabar, Afro-Brazilian “Orishas”, Flying-Low, and US Modern Dance. She received her BA in Dance and Anthropology from Bates College and has a post-graduate diploma in "Territory-Based Artistic Practices" from the National University of the Arts in Argentina. She was awarded a Fulbright​ Grant (USA) in 2022 to study a Masters in Performance/Dance at the HZT in Berlin, Germany. Her body-based research looked at anti-colonial practices, processes of decolonization, African diasporas, and ritual as they relate to performance. From 2014–2019 she lived in Buenos​ Aires, Argentina where she engaged in her artistic and political practice in community with Afro Latin American communities. There she co-founded Kukily, a transnational afrofeminist arts collective. As an independent artist she has performed and taught workshops in the US, Argentina, Liberia, Nigeria, Paraguay, Mexico, Spain, Germany and Ghana. Colleen Ndemeh recently started her dream project to build a cultural institution in Liberia which is currently in its initial building stage.