Above: Who Is Anton Wilhelm Amo? Created by Salina Momade and photographed by Pablo Hassmann in collaboration with Isaiah Lopaz, hn.lyonga, Eduardo Duco, Ronnie Vitalia Adam, Pedro Osório Mondlane, Meing Santo Deanc, Gowinda Ama Armoo, Diaga Müller, Sadia Marie Ouro-Gbele, Emmanuél Okafor, Inocêncio Virgilio Uamusse, Amaralina Schmidt, Robin von Elsner, Marinara Taveira, Jennifer Tâmara Akouvi Lotsi, Amal Schütz, Johnny Pira.
This post is part of our Behind the Scenes blog series. Here, we feature a conversation between artist-scholar Salina Momade and artist-scholar-curator Melanie Garland who discuss efforts to reimagine the life and legacy of German’s first known Black philosopher through the artwork, Who is Anton Wilhelm Amo? Momade and Garland are affiliated with the Amo Collective Berlin, a group of students, artists, scholars, and others at the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, part of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. This collective emerged through efforts to rename a local street after Anton Wilhelm Amo, an 18th century Afro-German philosopher. Project Vox’s next entry will focus on Amo, and we are excited to collaborate with members of the Collective as we research Amo’s life, work, and influence.
In August 2025, Salina Momade sat down with Melanie Garland to revisit what had unfolded the previous November at the Amo Salon exhibition space in Berlin-Mitte.
The occasion was Poetic Cartography Berlin, a festival organized by Amo Collective Berlin as part of its annual project Counter-Mapping Berlin: Experimental Urban Spacemaking after the Berlin Conference. Curated by hn. lyonga and Melanie Garland, the festival invited artists and poets to respond to a poetic manifesto centered on three guiding questions: Who We Are, Where We Come From, and Where We Are Going. Rooted in perspectives from the Global South, the program sought to challenge Eurocentric narratives and to give space to voices too often silenced by colonial history. The project Counter-Mapping Berlin was developed as a counterpoint to the 140th anniversary of the 1884–85 Berlin Conference. That commemoration highlighted how deeply colonial domination and violence continue to shape today’s institutions, relationships, and identities. Against this backdrop, Poetic Cartography used poetry and performance to imagine counter-cartographies—ways of reclaiming memory and history through multivocal and interconnected forms of expression (Garland, Maier, lyonga, Person, 2025).
It was within this framework that Salina Momade and the Black Student Union (BSU) at Humboldt University of Berlin were invited to develop the artwork Who is Anton Wilhelm Amo? The piece reimagines the image of Anton Wilhelm Amo, the Afro-German Enlightenment philosopher and early anti-racist thinker whose name was recently given to the former Mohrentraße in Berlin-Mitte. Despite his historical significance, Amo’s story has long been misrepresented, fragmented, and overlooked—particularly in online visual archives, where no authentic image of him is known to exist. In response, Salina and the BSU created a new portrait under the mentorship of transdisciplinary artist Isaiah Lopaz, whose artistic collage practice draws from African, Creole, and First Nations traditions. Their collaborative piece challenges distorted representations of Amo and offers an alternative image that honors his legacy while opening new paths for imagination.
In the following conversation, Salina speaks with Melanie about her experience working on this artwork—one that carries both personal and collective resonance. Her reflections on representation and erasure connect Anton Wilhelm Amo’s silenced history with the ongoing struggles of Afro-German communities for recognition, belonging, and dignity. In this sense, the collaborative artwork Who is Anton Wilhelm Amo? becomes more than a portrait; it is a way of reimagining how past, present, and future can intertwine to shape new forms of visibility. The work thus becomes an act of counter-mapping—a practice of resisting, remembering, and reimagining. It offers a way to navigate the everyday realities of Afro-Germans and other marginalized communities within a society still marked by racism and colonial spatial legacies, while envisioning more inclusive, multivocal, and interconnected urban futures (Garland, Maier, lyonga, Person, 2025).
Who is Anton Wilhelm Amo?
“Anton Wilhelm Amo was Germany’s first Black philosopher and writer. So much has been told about his story and also been lost. A lot of information turned out to be wrong and images of him to be identified as someone else. While trying to figure out who Amo is or was, we try to form an image, a visual creation of how he could have looked, dressed, and portrayed himself. He is a part of Black History as well as Afro-German history. His story is still one that needs to be told and researched. He is a reflection of Afro-German history back then as well as now. Through the images of Black people we can find a piece of him in us. Still facing the same or similar struggles, still fighting for our rightful place in society, still fighting for acknowledgement and so much more. We suffer, we cry, we fight, we hope, and we continue to strive. Fighting like Amo for our rights and freedom while the far right tries to deny. A history unknown that we try to uncover like the stories of so many more of us, our ancestors, those who came before us. Amo is a part of us.”
Salina Momade, Representative of the Black Student Union
Melanie: What drew you to Anton Wilhelm Amo’s story in the first place, and why did it feel urgent to work on his image now?
Salina: What drew me the most to Amo is how much we, in Germany/Berlin, but also myself, don’t know about Afro-German history and even how far this part of history traces back. Like my family’s starting point is the history of contract workers in Germany, but even that isn’t really discussed or taught in school. We only got to see the movie “Almanya” when it came out, and I was in secondary school, and that was it. So it was like, yeah, there were Turkish guest/contract workers, and that’s it. But what about the Mozambiquans, like my father, or the Angolans? Especially, my generation was mostly made up of second-generation children of contract workers from African countries and Vietnam.
So, like in my 20s, after I joined the Black Student Union at Humboldt University, I wanted to explore more about our history and what brought us here. I came across the renaming of streets and M-Str. which is like the most haunting name, I would say, being renamed to Anton-Wilhelm-Amo Straße struck out the most to me, and I was wondering who is the [that] person?
At that time, I also got to know Andrea-Vicky, who was researching Amo, and while I did my research on Amo to create an Instagram post about him, I reached out to her to take a look at it. What was fascinating but also shocking was that she made me aware of all the holes and fake information that were circulating around Amo, and I was wondering how that is even possible with most of those websites and articles being double-checked, and no one noticing they are just reproducing false information. Especially, Andrea-Vicky pointing out to me how even the images of him are false representations and don’t even represent him, but are other Black people, was shocking, but also not at the same time. Even nowadays, the idea persists that all Black people look alike, Africa not being a continent but a country, and so on. Like, just recently, I got mistaken by a neighbor of my hairstylist for her or maybe another Black neighbor, and we don’t look alike at all; she’s dark-skinned, and I’m light-skinned. But it didn’t seem to matter to this white, male neighbor; he just shared his personal family issue with me, even though I don’t know him, and went his way.
So I guess to kind of sum it up, what catches me even now the most when it comes to Amo is how his history, the puzzle pieces we have of him, and the facts we know are still important, and how we see Black people nowadays. Especially how easily they can be misrepresented, and it takes such a long time until someone comes forward and corrects that. Like for Amo, it took centuries, decades, until now we have more of an awareness that some of the information circulating around is false, and a small awareness that those pictures aren’t representing him, with even some pages having the name of the actual person written out.
Melanie: You mention the loss and distortion of information surrounding Amo’s life. How did that ambiguity shape your process? Were you more focused on recovery or (and) on reimagining?
Salina: It was a kind of haunting process where the question of who Amo was haunted me. I’m more of a person who can work easily when I have some visual representation and through that can be able to kind of build a relationship with the person, which wasn’t the case with Amo. There are no pictures of him, so I had to try to create my own image of how Amo could have looked in my mind while trying to imagine what kind of person he might have been. The information I gathered through the help of Andrea-Vicky was pretty helpful in the process. As I also did this project while having to write a 20-page term paper, it kind of limited how much research I could do on Amo which wasn’t that much of an issue to me as my goal was in the first place also to inspire people/viewers to do their own research and also question what I put out there and feel free to criticize me as I’m not an Amo expert. So my work is like a starting point, maybe for some to discover Amo, but also maybe the stories of other Black, Indigenous, and People of Color whose stories haven’t been told yet or have been misrepresented. So my focus was more on reimagining, and for people to do the work of recovering more on Amo or maybe even people related to him and his story.
Melanie: This work came to life through collective effort. How did collaboration within the Amo Collective and the Black Student Union inform the visual and conceptual choices you made?
Salina: I already had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do. From the beginning, it was clear to me that I wanted to do a portrait collage. When we brainstormed within the BSU about what we wanted to submit, the idea of the reflection came up, and my brain immediately started to come up with creative ideas. First, doing Polaroids and assembling them in a silhouette shape, but also using pieces of knowledge we have of Amo. And my own brainstorming went on from that, which was like a never-ending process.
Thanks to the conversation with hn. lyonga and you (Melanie), we came up with the idea of connecting me with Isaiah Lopaz, who’s already an accomplished artist focusing on collages and could help me with my journey and creative process. Just knowing that and seeing his work really inspired me and made me look forward to being in conversation with him. All of the meetings were happening over Zoom, but it felt like we had known one another for a long time. The conversation and brainstorming together really helped me a lot in finding a concrete shape of what I wanted the portrait to look like in the end. Also, as the conversation was like a safe space to express oneself and feel free and comfortable with one another, I wanted to ensure that this process and atmosphere would continue during my process.
Before taking the pictures, I asked the models if they have a favorite space or place in Berlin, which would also mean taking photos of Black people claiming space in a white dominated society in the end. Most of my models didn’t have one, so I wanted to take the picture at the African Quarter in Berlin, which is deeply connected to our history, Afro-German history, not in a positive way, but with us in that space expressing joy, we overwrote in that moment the background history of that part of Berlin with Black Joy and Black empowerment. We were in conversation the whole time, and it was so inspiring to bring people together who haven’t known one another before and who share the same background and enjoy one another’s presence. It was a really enjoyable and powerful part of the process.
Melanie: One of the aims of the artwork was to counter problematic online portrayals of Amo. What kind of challenges did you encounter in creating an image that both resists and reclaims?
Salina: That part really haunted me throughout the process. On the one hand, I would have loved to give Amo the freedom of existing aside from those portrayals, but on the other hand, they would always be a part of him and always continue to be assigned to him. Even with the knowledge being out there that those pictures don’t portray him, they still continue to show up when you Google Amo. The Internet is a scary place in that regard, as it won’t let you forget and continue to reproduce that harmful racist idea of “all Black people look alike.”
Because of that scary and haunting thought, I created a collage out of most of the images and cut them out to create the collar of Amo’s jacket. I chose the four most circulating images that supposedly portray Amo. The most famous one, a black-and-white image of an “older version” of him, is actually Daniel Jackson Sanders, who was an African-American clergyman, academic administrator, and newspaper publisher, and lived from 1847-1907. So a person from a whole different continent, with a different history, and from a whole different timeframe, is being mistaken for Amo. The second one is a picture of a “young version” who is actually Zamor and was a French revolutionary, and was maybe born in Bangladesh. His story might have some overlap with Amo’s in that he got to the European continent, and how only theories are circulating around how he got to Europe, maybe being enslaved and kidnapped, but still a whole different person from a whole different continent. Another image is actually portraying Jacobus Capitein, who was Ghanian like Amo, but in contrast to Amo, he studied theology and became a minister. Their story might have the most overlaps in how they got to Europe, and how Jacobus’ story is also lacking information, but still, a whole different person. And what was most tantalizing about those images was their eyes and how they looked at you.
It was like they wanted to tell you I am me, not him. I am my own person with my own story and own adventures, struggles, and accomplishments. It was like they said, tell my story or at least Say My Name! I wanted to show that these images can be suffocating and haunting, especially by highlighting the eyes of the people who like stare at you, and like I said, emphasize that they will always be a part of Amo’s history, even if we or they don’t want to be. I think it’s important to always emphasize, even if one uses them, that those are misrepresentations and, if possible, to name the real person, to tell their story, which is not connected to Amo in any way.
Melanie: You’ve described Amo as central to both Black history and Afro-German history. How do you see those histories meeting—or diverging—within this piece?
Salina: Amo is central to Black history when we look at how he even got to Germany. We don’t know if he was enslaved or not; we know he might have been kidnapped and shipped to a foreign country without his consent. Just that part alone reflects the ongoing lack of education about Afro-German history when it comes to the question of when African people came to Germany and how. Also, disregarding Germany’s role in the slave trade. We didn’t appear out of nowhere; there is a long history that precedes our existence, without the knowledge of most people. Amo was separated from his family, his country, his roots, and his home. Also, how we miss so much of his history that needs to be recovered, which resonates a lot with Black and Afro-German history. Amo is like just the starting point of people whose history was consciously erased, like the one of Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier De Saint-Georges, or those who need to be uncovered, like Amo. There are like open questions that would be great if we could answer them, like was Amo alone on his journey as a Black child to Europe? Did he get to meet other Black people during his time in Germany and during his studies?
Melanie: Your artist’s statement carries strong emotional weight—pain, resilience, hope. How did these feelings shape your creative process?
Salina: I think those emotions followed me along my journey in uncovering how I could have imagined Amo during his time. What kind of person he might have been and what he might have looked like. The pain is that it will take a long time, or maybe we won’t be able to discover a true image of Amo and what he really looked like. The resilience in not adding another misrepresentation of him and showing that he’s more than just a historical figure of the past, and how his story is still relevant nowadays. Hope that his story will soon be fully told, that the struggle he faced and we still have will be milder. That we as a community come together and share laughter and joy while looking at Amo, as I’ve done in the portrait. That our struggles weren’t for nothing, but are paving a way for the future and next generations to come, who hopefully will have it easier than most of us.
Melanie: In the description of this artwork, you wrote: “Through the images of Black people we can find a piece of him in us.” Could you talk about how this idea guided the collage? Where do you see Amo in contemporary Black lives?
Salina: Every time I thought of Amo, somehow my vision/eyes always shifted to the Black people that surrounded me. I hope that Amo also had people or a community during his time where he could find peace, companionship, and recognition, knowing he’s not alone in his journey, and that some people stood behind him. Some of the struggles Amo faced, unfortunately, haven’t vanished. Most of us are still struggling in isolation, not knowing where we can find our community. Like even when I take a look at my own story, with my siblings, we were mostly the only Black children in kindergarten, in primary school among 1-2 others, during my first semester at a German Gymnasium the only one at the whole school, in secondary-school the only one in my class for a long time and lastly at university where I hoped to find more people like me still feeling alone among white people. As soon as the news of the Black Student Union appeared my heart was like at an utmost delight, I can’t even put it in words how happy I was to find community and Black people who faced the same or similar struggles as me and to have people who acknowledge your feelings and experience and won’t downplay it saying, “You’re too sensitive,” or, “It wasn’t meant like that.” Those feelings are from my point of view, or what I imagined Amo could also have felt like. We still have a long way to go, especially here in Germany, when it comes to acknowledging the experiences of Black people, especially regarding racism and discrimination. Amo paved a way, which we still continue to expand for other generations to come.
Melanie: This portrait feels like a form of visual reclamation. What do you hope younger generations might take from seeing Amo this way?
Salina: I hope that the younger generation will feel first and foremost represented through that art piece and see themselves in it, but also inspired to create something of their own. Also that it will show them that yeah, we have to go through struggles, but our joy won’t diminish. Even if we have to go through hard times, we can’t forget to take care of ourselves and still be joyful and enjoy our lives. Also, to see that they can also be part of an academic space and that they can and should take the space they need in academia or other places. They are not alone; there is a community of people like them standing behind them and supporting them.
Melanie: By closing this thoughtful conversation, I would like to ask one last question: When you say in the artwork description “fighting like Amo,” what does that fight look like to you today—both artistically and politically?
Salina: Fight for the correct representation, to be seen where most don’t want you to be seen. Take space and don’t feel guilty for doing so. It’s ok to fight in your own way; you don’t always have to stand at the front line. Amo fought in an academic space for the rights of Black people, which shows that there are many ways to fight for the cause. To make people aware of the issues that are underrepresented and not recognized. Do not give up, and also ask for support if needed.
References
(Forthcoming) Garland, M., Maier, J. C., Lyonga, Hn., Person, N. (2025). Traces of Counter-Mapping: Rethinking Berlin after the Berlin Conference. Book chapter, part of the book The (Counter) Atlas, Lee Douglas, Magdalena Buchczyk, Aimée Joyce (Eds.). (Peer review). De Gruyter Press.
