Ajak A. Majok put a question at the centre of a three-year project: What if I was free? The wording sounds simple until the artist starts to move it across forms. She recorded intimate conversations with Black and brown people in Finland. She kept a working diary. She edited writing into a book of poems. She developed a solo dance performance from that book. A question that might have remained a political slogan became a sequence of encounters between speech, page, body and audience.
In a conversation for Protopia, Majok describes the project as an attempt to approach an Afrofuturist idea of freedom for Black and brown bodies in the Finnish cities where she has lived: Oulu, Kokkola and Helsinki. The locations are specific. So is her decision to ask about freedom as an experience rather than a legal abstraction. What would it feel like to talk without censoring oneself? What sort of movement becomes possible among people who can recognize one another? How can a book carry the emotions of conversations that were intentionally kept private? These questions make her practice unusually grounded. The future she seeks is not announced by a machine or a distant planet. It begins in a room where a person can speak.
The Helsinki-based South Sudanese artist works across dance, writing and other disciplines. In an extended conversation for Finland's Protopia podcast, she called herself an artist with a capital A and described her freelance practice as a way to undertake projects that feel urgent. The programme also asked her directly about Afrofuturism. Majok linked her approach to communal dreaming, storytelling and the traditions of her own Muonyjang, or Dinka, people. She recognized the importance of African American Afrofuturist figures such as Octavia Butler and Sun Ra while locating her own question in African and Finnish experience. That difference of position shapes the work. Majok does not need to reproduce the look of a US lineage to ask what Black futures can mean in Finland.
The first form was conversation
At the outset of What if I was free?, Majok held conversations with other Black and brown people. She recorded a series of them, but kept the recordings between herself and each participant because the discussions became personal. This choice establishes an important boundary. The project drew strength from people's willingness to speak, but the existence of the artwork did not make their intimate accounts public property. The private conversation was a place to think, not raw material to be displayed without limit.
Majok told Protopia that she wanted to convey the feelings in those conversations. She spoke about spaces in which people did not have to edit themselves before speaking. That is a strong starting point for a work on freedom because it treats freedom as a change in relation. No abstract guarantee can substitute for the difference between entering a room cautiously and entering it with the expectation of being understood. A person may have the formal right to speak and still calculate which parts of a story will be questioned, explained away or turned into a lesson for someone else. Majok's project attends to the energy spent on that calculation.
The city-to-city perspective matters too. Oulu, Kokkola and Helsinki cannot be collapsed into one account of Finnish life. Majok has spoken about different encounters in each place and about the movement south through her years in Finland. Naming all three cities prevents the work from placing Black Finnish experience only in the capital. It asks what a future looks like in the places a person has actually had to inhabit, study in and leave. A map of freedom made from lived routes will have more than one centre.
The conversations also resist the image of the artist as a solitary visionary who simply invents a better world. Majok's question is developed with others. Listening precedes the book and the performance. Her process recognizes a future as something people have to be able to make together, while keeping the conditions for honest speech in view. It is a demanding form of imagination. The more intimate the exchange, the more carefully the artist must decide what can be carried onward.
From diary to poems
The book Kins keeper emerged through editing rather than through a fixed plan to publish poetry. During the project Majok kept a working diary and wrote short stories, essays and reflections prompted by the conversations. A period in London during Black History Month brought her into contact with books of poetry by Black writers. She returned to her own writing and began reshaping it into poems. That shift matters formally: a poem can preserve a feeling without reproducing a private conversation as testimony. It can concentrate and redirect what the artist has heard and lived.
Published independently in 2023, Kins keeper takes its title from the work of maintaining relationships. In the Protopia conversation, Majok explained kinkeeping as the care that keeps relatives and chosen kin connected. She spoke of being a sister to people related by blood and to people who are not. The title therefore joins the practical to the expansive. Keeping kin can mean sending a message, remembering a need, making a visit or carrying a story. In the book it becomes a way to imagine belonging that is made through action rather than granted by a category.
The Finnish readers Aracelis Correa and Téri Zambrano, writing for POC-lukupiiri, describe a collection concerned with family roles, friendship, love and disappointment. They singled out poems including Shapeshifter, Madness, Heartbreak, Brother's keeper, Strangers and Stacking dolls. Their account is useful because it suggests the collection does not offer kinship as an uncomplicated comfort. Relationships can shelter a person and wound them. A keeper may have to decide what care demands, and what it cannot repair. The poems' emotional range makes the title more credible than a simple declaration of unity would be.
Majok writes in English. For a South Sudanese artist working in Finland, that choice creates a different field of address from a book written in Finnish alone. It does not determine a single imagined reader. English can move between the Finnish context, other African diasporas and people whose own family histories cross languages. The language also lets the title's small word “kin” travel. It is intimate and ordinary, yet able to name connections outside the biological family.
The move from conversations to poems changes the ethics of attention. A reader can enter the language without being invited to listen secretly to another person's private account. The book is a crafted work, not a transcript of people describing pain. Majok's writing gives the emotional question a form that readers can return to, take slowly, and interpret without possessing its original speakers. The page permits closeness while maintaining distance.
A body carries the book
In November 2023, Majok presented a solo performance also titled Kins keeper at Helsinki's Ateneum during UrbanApa's festival. The festival described the work as an interpretation of the poetry collection and part of What if I was free?. It lasted thirty minutes and used no dialogue. Audience members were invited to sit on the stage to follow the performance. These details establish a new composition for material first shaped as text: one moving person, people seated close by, and an absence of spoken explanation.
The silence is not an absence of language in the broader work. It is a transfer of responsibility to movement. A poem can say “sister,” “brother” or “kin”; dance has to make a relation perceptible through direction, distance, weight and time. A performer can approach an audience, turn away, hold a position or change pace. The spectator may feel the shifting energy without being told which word to attach to each action. That is an interpretive freedom the page and the stage share differently.
UrbanApa's description says the solo travels into familial ties among sisters, brothers and kin in melanin, channelling ancestral knowledge across past, present and future. The phrases could sound expansive on paper. A thirty-minute solo has to condense them into one body working through space. The performer cannot literally place every relative or ancestor on stage. She can make room for their presence through gesture and rhythm, and through the audience's own knowledge of care, absence or obligation. The performance is thus both singular and plural. One person is visible; the relationships that organize her motion are not limited to the number of bodies seen.
Inviting spectators onto the stage also alters the usual division between performer and viewer. People who accept the invitation do not become the principal dancers, but they occupy the zone normally reserved for the work. The distance between watching and sharing a space narrows. This is a precise formal choice for a project about freedom with others. It lets the question be experienced as proximity, rather than only contemplated from a row of seats.
There is no need to pretend that proximity produces instant community. Sitting near a performer is not the same as knowing her or the people whose lives informed the project. The artistic effect is subtler. The stage arrangement makes the audience aware that relation has a spatial dimension. Where a person sits, how close she is permitted to come, and how she responds to a moving body are all part of the encounter. The work asks the room to notice its own organization.
Dreaming from a particular place
In the Protopia conversation, Majok described her understanding of Afrofuturism as an aesthetic and imaginative field that revisits violent histories, examines the present and dreams of what comes next. She emphasized collective dreaming across a diaspora. Krull's interview with Julie Dash reaches a related question from another place: Dash describes the family storytelling of Daughters of the Dust as a speculative “what if.” Majok's work takes its own route through Finnish conversations, English-language poems and dance. She also distinguished the American genealogy she had read about from her own experience. She could admire Butler and Sun Ra without claiming an identical relationship to the histories that formed their work.
Majok's own reference point includes Muonyjang storytelling. She spoke about children learning through stories, speech becoming musical, and narrative giving guidance about how to look ahead. This is not an argument that one inherited tradition contains a complete map of the future. It is an account of how imagination is taught. A child hears a story and learns a possible relation between people, duty and time. Later, an artist takes those habits of attention into new places and forms.
The phrase What if I was free? sits between an individual and a collective question. “I” gives it a speaker with a body and a biography. The conditional “if” makes freedom a situation to be tested, not a possession already secured. But the project's methods make clear that the answer cannot concern one person alone. A body has room to move because others make, share or deny room. A speaker can risk honesty because listeners establish a condition of trust. A poem can reach readers because people maintain a network in which books circulate and are discussed.
This makes Majok's Afrofuturism responsive to the material world. She has connected the ability to dream with the pressures of work, education and racism in Finland. Those pressures are not visual ornaments to be overcome by fantasy. They shape whether someone has time, money and safety enough to imagine. The question of freedom reaches from a conversation held in trust to the larger arrangements that make such spaces scarce. Art does not substitute for those arrangements, but it can give a felt measure of what they allow and withhold.
Keeping is a verb
The title Kins keeper has the force of an action. To keep a relationship is to do something repeatedly. The idea sits against a cultural preference for describing the future as a breakthrough, a single decisive event after which everything changes. Majok's work offers a different rhythm. Conversations happen over time. A diary accumulates. Drafts become poems through revision. A body rehearses until an emotion can become movement. Kinship is maintained rather than discovered once and for all.
That rhythm allows the project to hold disappointment without losing its direction. Love and care do not guarantee that families or communities are easy places to live. The poems' reported range includes heartbreak and madness as well as closeness. A future built through kinship must make room for those frictions. The work's hope has weight because it does not ask the reader to imagine that every relationship has already been healed.
The book and performance also resist a simple hierarchy between writing and dance. Neither is an illustration of the other. The book makes time through language: a reader can pause, reread and let a line change on a second encounter. The performance makes time through a moving body: a gesture appears, develops and disappears while other people are present to witness it. The same project becomes newly vulnerable each time it changes medium. Words can name what a body leaves open. Movement can make an idea felt where an explanation would flatten it.
Majok's practice belongs to a wider Finnish conversation in which Black artists are shaping forms of futurity from their own places and disciplines. She mentioned working on Ima Iduozee's film After We're Gone and pointed to Sonya Lindfors as another artist whose work can carry Afrofuturist elements. Those connections do not dissolve the differences among them. A poet and dancer asking about freedom through kinship uses different tools from a filmmaker or a choreographer making a large ensemble work. Together they show that no single image can stand for a Finnish Black future.
The particular achievement of What if I was free? is that its question keeps moving without becoming vague. It begins among people who need a safer room in which to talk. It enters a diary and then a slim book. It reaches the Ateneum stage as a silent body moving near seated viewers. At each step, freedom becomes less like an abstract destination and more like a relation to be made, tested and kept. Majok's future is not waiting beyond Finland. It is being asked of the rooms, streets and institutions already there, and of the people who decide how much space another body may have within them.