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Ritual for Forgiveness marked the culmination of Artist-in-Residence Migline Paroumanou’s stay at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence – an evocative exploration of migration, memory, and healing through research and performance.

On 21 July 2025, Ritual for Forgiveness, the culminating event of Migline Paroumanou’s artist residency took place. Bringing together scholarly research and artistic practice, the performance offered a reflective exploration of migration, its entanglements with histories of slavery, and the possibilities of reconciliation.

Paroumanou, from La Réunion, France, was a Fellow at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies at the University of Bayreuth (UBT) from April to July 2025. Paroumanou creates artistic work which centres on migration in West Africa and its Diasporas. Her research engages closely with oral histories, memory practices, and the ways in which individuals and communities narrate their experiences of mobility. During her residency, Paroumanou developed these research interests into a creative process, experimenting with forms that move beyond conventional academic formats.

A key component of this process was a ceramic workshop in which participants engaged materially with questions of memory, fragmentation, and repair. The objects created during the workshop became part of Paroumanou’s final performance, and the participants themselves were actively involved, contributing to the collective and participatory character of the event.

Ritual for Forgiveness emerged from this process as both an intellectual and artistic intervention. The performance invited audiences to reflect on how histories of migration are shaped by rupture, displacement, and unresolved tensions, but also by resilience and the search for continuity. Framing the work as a “ritual” foregrounded the importance of collective reflection and symbolic action in addressing past and present forms of injustice.

Central to the work was storytelling. Drawing on her research, Paroumanou highlighted how personal narratives function not only as records of experience but as active processes through which individuals negotiate identity and belonging. Such narratives often carry layered memories that connect different places, generations, and social realities, creating space for these complexities to be acknowledged and shared.

Rather than presenting forgiveness as a fixed outcome, the work approached it as an ongoing and often difficult process. It raised questions about confronting painful histories, how memories are transmitted and transformed, and how individuals and communities might begin to engage with reconciliation.

As the highlight of the residency, Ritual for Forgiveness exemplified the Cluster’s commitment to experimental forms of knowledge production. It demonstrated how research can be transformed into an experiential format that engages audiences both intellectually and emotionally, inviting reflection on memory, identity, and belonging beyond the boundaries of academia.

More info on Migline Paroumanou and her fellowship: https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/en/Artists-in-Cluster-files/Paroumanou/index.html