Have You Met: The Right to Ambivalence

Living Room Session presents Have You Met, an intimate series that invites audiences to meet artists through their work and engage with the ideas, processes and stories that shape their creative practices across disciplines. For this edition, we present The Right to Ambivalence, an ethnographic film by researcher and filmmaker Olema Kweli exploring Black hair as a living archive of labour, beauty, and Black cosmopolitical belonging.
The Right to Ambivalence
Beginning with conversations within Amsterdam’s East African community, The Right to Ambivalence enters the intimate worlds of Black hair care. Braiding, washing, cutting, touching, and remembering become ways of moving through questions of beauty, inheritance, migration, community, and self-making.
The film moves between observational footage, family memories, photographs and conversations across generations and places. What can hair carry and what it can reveal about who we are, where we come from and how we relate to one another? At its centre is a refusal of easy oppositions: natural and non-natural, pro-Black and anti-Black, pleasure and pain, agency and constraint. Instead, the film lingers in the contradictions, proposing ambivalence as a space of possibility.
Film, conversation & connection
The screening is followed by a conversation with Olema Kweli, moderated by cultural curator and moderator Shaquille Shaniqua Joy. Together with the audience, you will explore some of the questions raised by the film and reflect on the experiences, tensions and perspectives it brings to the surface.
Before and after the programme, there will be a small market with food and a selection of care-related products. Take your time to eat, browse and connect with others around the themes of the afternoon.