On November 15th, 2025, Mono Space presented Gallery Hours as curated by Gem Nwannem. The DJ, writer, collector, and host of "Afternoon Jump Radio" on KFFP 90.3FM, described their program as an exploration of “the African diaspora as a living archive, as a conversation between sacred music, folk philosophy, and collective memory.”
A few weeks later, we had the opportunity to speak to Gem about their program.
MONO SPACE
We're a few weeks out from your Gallery Hours program in mid-November. Are there any impressions remaining with you from that day since then? Whether specific thoughts that came to you while working through your presentation, or any physical or felt experiences that have remained with you still.
Gem Nwannem
What sits with me most vividly is how the day began. People started drifting in as the Missa Luba record was already spinning, and I leapt straight into the story of the record without ever introducing myself. I was too excited to share sound with a room full of people who genuinely cared about listening and engaging with the sound. I didn’t even notice my omission until Lee slipped me a small piece of paper reminding me to introduce myself and the program to the audience. I still have it pinned above my desk. A reminder that context matters, especially when you’re trying to tell a story as unruly and sprawling as mine.
Throughout the afternoon, I found myself toggling between curator and spectator. I built this program like an essay, not a DJ set, and once it began, I experienced it almost like someone else had written it. I could stand outside the work and watch it move, watch it take shape in the room, watch people react. And in a few moments,especially during the more difficult records, I waited to see if I’d lose the audience. The World Bass Violin Ensemble, the Afrosonica compilation, the heaviness of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s piano pieces…aren’t exactly crowd-pleasers. They’re dense, dissonant, and emotionally challenging. But the room fully leaned in and I felt a kind of camaraderie in collective listening that I didn’t know I was looking for.
You took the listening gallery on a geographic, historic, and sonic journey as you moved through the African diaspora musically. Can you speak about that curatorial approach and narrative arc, which crossed the continent and the world, and moved across time and across artistic expressions?
The spine of the program was built from a question I’ve been circling all year. What does it mean to come from somewhere? As an immigrant, as a member of the African diaspora, as someone who has lived in multiple cities and carried all of them inside me, the idea of home or placemaking has never been straightforward. Home is less a point on a map and more a shifting constellation of memory, longing, inheritance, and contradiction. When you invited me to curate, it felt like an invitation to finally explore that question through sound.
I literally mapped it out. I grabbed a handful of push pins and a globe and challenged myself to trace lines across continents that could then be reflected in the program. What makes me who I am? What sounds have shaped me? Which records hold the evidence of my life? Starting with Missa Luba’s ethereal mass music was an attempt to reach back toward abstraction, toward the oldest forms of expression available to me. From there I moved into the West African genres that raised me; highlife, Fuji, palm-wine music. Instead of the flattened party versions that dominate Western spaces, I chose the melancholy, intellectual modes of expression that sit with sorrow as comfortably as joy.
It mattered to me that these records were already in my collection. I made a rule for myself to not buy new music for the program. Not because new records wouldn’t have helped, but because I wanted this to be a story told from what I already knew and loved and could testify to from personal experience. In order to hit the emotional resonance I wanted to reach, I knew the program had to abandon research in favor of memories instead of research. That constraint forced me to speak from truth instead of theory.
When the program moved into the European and American branches of the diaspora (jazz, blues, and the genres that spiraled outward from them) I stayed with that same logic. I didn’t pick the most canonical or recognizable recordings. I picked what I knew and could speak about. What was in conversation with the African sounds without trying to imitate them.
I wanted the emotional logic to be spacious and offer enough structure for people to understand the arc with enough abstraction for them to insert their own experiences. Migration might be universal, but each story is specific. I wasn’t trying to summarize the African diaspora but instead articulate my experience of it, and leave room for others to interpret the story through their own histories.
One of the most vulnerable moments for me was playing the Celestine Ukwu record. It’s a record I rarely play in public because it carries a history I’ve never fully articulated aloud. Telling that story in that room was a moment that will stay with me. As an immigrant, I’ve learned to be guarded about my personal history. This program pushed me toward a kind of vulnerability that felt important, even if it didn’t feel easy.
When you were about to play the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru record (Church of Kidane Mehret) you prepared the listeners with a note that the record had a profound sense of sadness to it for you. And later in the day, you played some notably challenging recordings with the World Bass Violin Ensemble and the Afrosonica compilation. It was clearly important to you that the program would have a range of emotion and musical expression. It's a bit of a risk for a program curator, DJ or presenter to go in directions that might take an audience out of a comfort zone, no matter how open or curious they may be. Why did you want to push into those directions?
When I think about the emotional range of the program, the grief in Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s playing, the dissonance of the World Bass Violin Ensemble, the percussive force of Afrosonica, I realize that part of why I programmed those pieces is because I didn’t know any better. I’m a novice in this kind of public curation. I don’t have a mentor whispering norms to me or years of institutional knowledge telling me what an audience will or won’t tolerate. And that inexperience turned out to be freeing. I didn’t know what risk was supposed to look like, so I had no choice but to follow instinct.
If I had asked around or shared my set in advance, I think most people would’ve cautioned me away from the harder material. They would’ve told me to keep things accessible, or maintain the room’s energy, or avoid playing anything too mournful in the early afternoon. But I wasn’t trying to manage the room. I was trying to tell the truth. The emotional terrain of the African diaspora isn’t smooth, so why should the program be? You can’t talk about movement, longing, rupture, survival, or inheritance without sitting inside friction.
Introducing the Gebru record felt necessary because her work holds a kind of sacred sadness that shouldn’t slip by unnoticed. It’s honest music that names the ache and spells out what has been lost and what remains. And in the context of the program, it opened a door into emotions that are just as much part of the diaspora as joy or celebration. The same is true of the more challenging ensemble recordings like Bassically Yours. They complicate the narrative. They resist becoming background.
I also trusted the room. Not in the sense of believing everyone would like it, but in believing that people were willing to engage. Portland has a rare level of connoisseurship. Listeners who don’t flinch at difficulty, who welcome texture, who understand that not every story resolves neatly. That gave me permission to go deep, and stretch the emotional range as far as it needed to go.
I chose those records because they challenged me. Because they were honest. Because they were necessary to the story I was trying to tell.
The Young Fathers album (Heavy, Heavy) was a revelation on the sound system. It was immediately clear that streaming and digital files cannot properly express what they achieve in the studio. You were visibly moved by the playback of that album. Can you speak to what that Young Fathers album means to you? And if you heard anything in the playback of Heavy, Heavy at the listening gallery that you hadn't noticed prior?
I knew from the beginning that Heavy, Heavy would close the program. It’s an album that came into my life on my 28th birthday, after nasal surgery, when my wife and I ended up at a Young Fathers show having never heard a single track. That night changed how I listen to music. It rearranged the internal circuitry of my ear. I’ve described that record as alchemic because I truly believe it altered something in me.
Even on cheap headphones or in the car, the record felt enormous. But hearing it on the Mono Space system was something else entirely. When it played, I was part of the audience, floating in it. I could feel the sound in my ribs, my teeth, my skin. Every once in a while, I’d open my eyes and see everyone else suspended in the same spell. Literally leaning forward, swaying, eyes closed, fully enveloped. It felt like we had all dropped into the same emotional pocket, like the narrative I’d tried so hard to build all day had clicked into something tangible.
If the entire program were a single record, it would be Heavy, Heavy. A body made of parts from everywhere, references scattered across time and place, stretching wildly, but holding its shape.
Lastly, any thoughts on what you'd like to explore next with a future program at Mono Space?
I’ve been thinking a lot about Theaster Gates’ idea of sound as emotional abstraction, especially in the context of Black musical histories (gospel, classical, free jazz). I’m interested in what happens when you strip sound away from subject matter and just sit with the feeling. I’m also thinking about Black ambient music, a lineage that hasn’t been properly explored or named even though it grew from the same soil as free jazz. There’s something there; something about healing, something about the emotional afterlife of sound.
I could also see myself going hyper-specific with a deep dive on highlife, or Fuji, or a focused excavation of Black Portland’s musical history. There’s so much that hasn’t been touched or contextualized within our current environment. What I know for sure is that I want the next program to hold a question big enough to wrestle with. I want people to walk into the room curious and walk out changed, or at least rearranged. Mono Space offered me the chance to ask real questions out loud, and see what answers arrived in the room with me.I’d love to be a part of a program that allows more of that conversation.
Featuring:
Missa Luba
Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin
Church of Kidane Mehret
Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
No Condition Is Permanent,
Ogadiliginma
Nelly Uchendu
Synchro Sound System & Power: Made in Lagos
Various Artists – Nigeria Fuji Machine
FLEE Issue No. 1 – Benga Music
arious Artists (FLEE Project)
Agadez
Etran de l’Air
Special Biennale Du Mali: Le Jeune Chansonnier Du Mali
Ali "Farka" Toure
Irakere
Irakere
The Wild Tchoupitoulas
The Wild Tchoupitoulas
The Circle of Time
Amina Claudine Myers Trio
BASSically Yours
World Bass Violin Ensemble with Brian Smith as Music Director
Afrosonica (MEG Archives)
Various Artists
Constitution
Asher Gamedze & The Black Lungs
Heavy Heavy
Young Fathers
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