Where There is No Door

Objects talk back with Logan February

Porträt von Logan February – Porträt von Logan February

Objects Talk Back is a project about the possibilities of literature to open up new stories and relations through museum archives. International writers are invited to explore collections at the Humboldt Forum, to select an object, and write about it however they wish. Priya Basil, curator of the project, coined the term ‘fabulography’ for this approach: it involves working creatively with-from-through gaps, erasures and (un)truths around objects in order to expand narrative and imaginative landscapes that have for too long been patrolled and limited by the museum.

Objects Talk Back recognizes that museum collections are inextricably tied to violent colonial histories and on-going practices of domination.

The project reaches towards knowledges of resisting-surviving-transcending colonial ruptures; it is animated by living connections between people, places and things. How far might stories take us in understanding-experiencing-imagining different worlds? Let’s find out as Objects Talk Back.

A Yorùbá door, carved from iroko wood in the twentieth century, lies hidden in the depot of the Ethnological Museum—unreachable in materiality and meaning. As the first poet-in-residence at the Humboldt Forum, Nigerian author Logan February confronts a conundrum of agency: who grants, and who gains access? How does native knowledge resonate in this fraught proximity to the object? Where there is no door, what becomes of privacy, consent, and the sacred?

Combining prose poems with reflections on the research process, this psychedelic essay created for Objects Talk Back turns absence into adventure. Through the mysteries of a lost serpent cult, the legacy of master carvers, anonymous and renowned alike, and a spiritual sensing of objects made invisible to the searching eye, we go far beyond the door.

Logan February’s writing enacts a parallel act of carving, creating a glorious portal through words. For the poet, it is the fruit of a kind of failure, a mournful triumph of imaginary possibility over material loss. Across history’s gaps, poet and door commune to overwrite the museum’s omnipresent law: Please keep your distance from the objects.

PARTICIPANTS

Logan February

Logan February is a Nigerian poet and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores desire, psychospirituality, and Afro-queer identity. Their poetry collections include In The Nude (Ouida Poetry, 2019) and Mental Voodoo (Poesie Dekolonie/Engeler Verlag, 2024). Their short film, Thrall, was an official selection at the 2025 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival. February received the Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature and recent fellowships from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, the Berlin Senate Department for Culture, and the Literaturhaus Wien, among others. In 2025 they were poet-in-residence at the Humboldt Forum. Now a Junge Akademie Literature fellow at the Akademie der Künste, Logan February lives in Berlin.

Priya Basil

Priya Basil is an author, and curator of the Humboldt Forum project Objects Talk Back. In her book Be My Guest/Gastfreundschaft (2019), she combines memoir, philosophy, food and politics in a reflection on hospitality in the broadest sense. Her most recent book  Locked In and Out (2025) explores memory-culture and belonging in Germany.

Priya is co-founder and board member of WIR MACHEN DAS, an NGO that works with refugees and migrants for a more inclusive society. She is also a member of the advisory board of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. She has conceptualized and curated projects for various institutions including the Goethe Institut and International Literature Festival Berlin. From 2021 to 2023 Priya was International Writer in Residence for Mindscapes, a project of the Wellcome Trust UK, devoted to transforming how we understand, talk about and treat mental health. As part of this Priya undertook a research journey which spanned six continents to learn about different understandings of well being and practices of healing. In 2024, Priya was Writer in Residence for Canopy, Wellcome’s  Climate and Health project. She is working on a new book which draws on her research and travels. In 2025/26 Priya is a fellow of the The Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation Käte Hamburger Kolleg based at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

- Price: 12 EUR, reduced 6 EUR

- Language: English

- Place: Mechanical Arena in the Foyr

- Part of: Objects talk back

Next date:

• Date Thursday, 23/April/2026 19:00
• Venue Humboldt Forum: Mechanische Arena im Foyer, EG
• Address Schloßplatz, 10178 Berlin-Mitte