Ar:range:ments

Author: Esther Kondo Heller

Publisher: Fonograf (2025)

Can words hold a note? Can language foam like a mouth? In Ar:range:ments, Esther Kondo Heller creates textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document. What arrangements exist between a mother and child? In listening to Black queer life in Berlin, Mombasa, and London, the action of arranging becomes a means of sounding out a collective utterance of Black survival with joy amidst grief, colonialism, medical racism, and loss.

Ar:range:ments collectively thinks with, amongst others, the works of Audre Lorde, May Ayim, Fred Moten, NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Marvin Gaye, Taylor Johnson, and Gabrielle Octavia Rucker.