nora chipaumire

June 19, 2026, 20.00 h
June 20, 2026, 20.00 h
Duration 105 minutes

Regular 28,-/ Reduced rate 16,- EUR
Pre-sale

The event takes place without seating. The audience is invited to move freely through the performance spaces. There will be rapid changes of action and varying sensory stimuli of medium to high intensity. Depending on your position, these may also come into close physical proximity. The volume will be high. Ear protection is available free of charge.

In a sculpture-sound installation animated by live performance, nora chipaumire creates a house full of radical, participatory possibilities for decolonisation. “Dambudzo”, which means ‘trouble’ in Shona, revives the ideas of radical African thinkers and connects them with chipaumire's own thoughts and experiences, with current political realities and resistance to (neo-)colonial control. The artist explores the revolutionary potential of performance and confronts colonial legacies by featuring a Zimbabwean ‘shabini’, an informal bar set up in private homes, where people come together to imagine possibilities of resistance and insurrection against political powers.

Through bodily expression, chipaumire explores a language that goes beyond words, seeking to transcend the limits imposed by language. She uses movement as a personal and universal means of communication, enabling a more subtle and intuitive understanding.

nora chipaumire was born in 1965 in what was then known as Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). She is a shaped by colonial education for black native Africans - known as group B schooling - and is invested in knowledge acquisition and sharing outside of prescribed parameters. Her life and artistic work engage with aesthetics informed by refusal, defiance, negotiation, contradictions and more. These refusals take form of movement, objects, non objects, manifestos, sound and building a pedagogical practice (nhaka) that works the present now with the present past.

Concept & Creative Direction: nora chipaumire 
Performers: nora chipaumire, Tatenda Chabarwa, Joyce Delores Edwards, SoKo Jena,
Fatima Katiji, Jonathan Kudakwashe Daniel, Mohamed Y. SHIKA, tyroneisaacstuart, Shamar Watt, Gilbert Zvamaida 
Music recordings: Bhundu Boys
Film Production: Mieke Ulfig
Sound engineers: Vusumuzi Moyo, Kwamina Biney.
Technical Director: Heidi Eckwall, set construction: Irene Pätzug
Company Management: jay beardsley, Amélie Gaulier, Laetitia Tshombe
Booking & Distribution: ArKtype / Thomas O. Kriegsmann, Astrid Rostaing
“Dambudzo” is a commission of Wiener Festwochen and Festival d’Automne à Paris, produced by nora chipaumire, and developed in residency with Callie's Berlin.
Funded by the Visual Arts Project Fund of the Goethe-Institut.
nora chipaumire inc. is supported by the Mellon Foundation.