Skip to content

Values & Mission

Our strength is

in our ability to imagine -

to push boundaries

of what we can do

together

sun pattern
31

The yard is the kitchen, the dance, the gayelle and the shrine. We operate from a particular set of values that shape the way we work and the work we do.

5
31
Our Misson and Values
31
two women in scarves
Our Vision

Our strength is in our ability to imagine - to push the boundaries of what we can do together, to make nurturing spaces, to facilitate creative expressions and to contribute to the building of thriving futures. Laku Neg was established to provide a platform of online content for African and African diaspora artists and those interested in African diaspora arts, culture and philosophy to collaborate, to share knowledge and to make central the people, spaces and communities where such knowledges are forged.

We facilitate opportunities for knowledge exchange and foster legacies through research, documentation, conversations, and events. LAKU NEG is one of the few Black, female-run arts companies in Wales’ arts and creative industry. Our reach extends throughout Wales, the UK and the Caribbean and to all the translocational global spaces of the African diaspora.

The concept of a circum-Atlantic world insists on the centrality of diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa and the Americas, North and South, in the creation of the culture of modernity. Joseph Roach

5
31
woman's hand with paint brush
Why we exist?

Laku Neg was established to provide a platform of online content for African and African diaspora artists to collaborate. We have both an inward and outward focus. We acknowledge that our preoccupations are directly conceived because of where we are located and our movement between spaces.

We acknowledge that as diaspora people (even as second and third generation), we also look out of ourselves, for glimpses of ourselves. Our homes are in multiple places much as our stories and legacies transcend a single geographic location.
 

Our Values

The yard is the kitchen, the dance, the gayelle and the shrine

The company operates from a particular set of values which shape the way we work and the work we do. It shapes our care and creative solutions and systems (policies and practices), our programmes of work and the manner of our national and international engagements across all our platforms. Our values are rooted in the intimacy and generative knowledge of the daily rituals and practices found in the close confines of such spaces as Caribbean and African backyards:

two men performing with instrument

The Gayelle

Value statement related to encounters. This involves making space for personal growth through the acknowledgement of moments of conflict and times when safe-guarding is important. The gayelle becomes a metaphor for the space/s where differences can be engaged, where conflicts (local, national and global) can be raised and worked through and broader realisations of our collective agency embraced. Embracing differences through our creative journeys and spaces.

woman seated by clay earthen object

The Shrine

Value statement related to our ethical positioning. We know ourselves as embodiment and continuation of the past. We understand our work as something that affects the next generation. In that light we honor the past, validate the present and imagine the future and in so doing, adopt a vision of seeing ourselves as of nature, intervening for greater change and working towards a greener, more equitable world.

Latest Articles

Musings
29 July 2024
In Ifa, ancestors are an essential part of the spiritual realm and serve as guides and protectors. Every individual has a lineage and within the Ifa practice there is an ‘obligation to communicate with the ancestors on a daily basis’ (Fatunmbi). 
Essays
26 February 2024
Displacement has disrupted our rich traditions – our literal modes of survival – leaving us without actualising rites for our current state. A lack of collective intention bodes ill for the future. How then can we unpack our past and engage with our present to disrupt these futures?    
Essays
02 January 2024
I can’t speak for other Black artists, I can only discuss my own experience as a Black woman in the arts. It is something that requires skin like iron and a gentle beating heart, it is something that, I believe, has not quite fulfilled its great potential due to historical oppression, exclusion and misuse.