About the Project Poetry as in the market-square: public, cohesive and antiphonal, mirroring aspects of oral performances in Africa.

The Global Cento is a touring poetry installation designed to incite community writing. The project is presented as an archive of intercultural and intergenerational voices responding to prompts about the underlying connections and experiences all people share regardless of our differing labels. 

In The Global Cento, a poem (Collage) – an ode to memory – that first chronicles the poet’s recollections, becomes the canvas for mutual reminiscence. The practice creates space for the possibilities of a cross-cultural story, crafted by both the poet and the audience– establishing collective authorship. 

Origins of the Work The Global Cento has its roots in an experimental-style poem written as a part of The Last Time I Called, my chapbook of poems on loss, memory and nostalgia produced during my Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Fellowship Residency (Lagos, 2022). 

The poem, “Grief: A Questionnaire” is structured as a form questionnaire inviting the reader to participate in my musings on grief by filling in the blanks with memories recollected. That concentration on participatory writing would inspire the antiphonal nature of my future experiments:  “Arriving by Sound” a participatory performance poem showcased at Ayen Iyak’s inaugural exhibition, We Found Refuge In the Famished Road (Akwa Ibom, 2024); “Family Tree”, a five-part chorus written and recorded for the Earth Rising Project (2025), and “Collage, Helsinki”, the direct progenitor of this project. 

In the third quarter of 2024, I began to think of multiple ways to bring into practice the idea of communal writing: poetry as process, as construction, as continuous draft, as material, as multi-lingual, as multi-media, as visual, long-durational and multi-authored; curious about poetry as a shared process rather than a solitary practice. I ask, “How can a work make space for everybody – even those without the fancy for or knowledge of the pen – to feel at-home-enough, to share their pulse with us?”  It is at the heart of this rumination that The Global Cento has its being.  See Collage, Helsinki.