Simone Dede Ayivi’s performances discuss questions about representation, resistance and community. Her works are biographically motivated and mostly interview-based research projects. She walks along paths of remembrance and rediscovery – and brings political struggles and movements, Black history and the present into the spotlight. Through the use of recorded conversations, interviews and political speeches, she endeavors to strengthen the voices of marginalized communities. With Afrofuturist narratives, she creates a space within the theater to ponder, translate and reinvent. A space for utopias.

Simone unveils her research methods and the tools of theater and thus allows the audience to become part of her content-based and aesthetic search process. In doing so, the construction of images is taken as a topic and seeing habits are taken into question. With her Accomplices, she has developed performances in cooperation with Sophiensaele, Pavillon Hanover, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt as well as Festival Theaterformen. As a director, she was worked, amongst other theaters, at Schauspielhaus Graz and Theater Oberhausen.

Simone studies cultural studies and aesthetic practice at the University of Hildesheim. She is one of the authors of Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (Your Homeland Is Our Nightmare) and she has writings that have been published in a wide variety of collections. She continues to write for, amongst other publications, Zeit Online, Tagesspiegel, Missy Magazine and the newspaper taz. Ayivi is active within ISD – Initiative Schwarzer Menschen in Deutschland (the Initiative of Black People in Germany) and is a member of the board of Lause Lebt e.V.