The Matriarch's Verse Experience 2025

The Matriarch’s Verse Experience has never just been about Poetry; it’s about the lives we live behind the poems.

The Matriarch’s Verse Experience 2025: The Gospel According to Adulting draws from Apiorkor Seyiram Ashong-Abbey’s new book of the same name — but this isn’t about her perspectives, alone. It’s about all of us navigating the chaos of work, love, money, family, grief, identity, and hope.

Through verse, performance, discussion, and immersive multidisciplinary Art, this year’s Experience turns the chapters of that book into spaces of reflection — a collective therapy session for grown-ups, a classroom for creatives, and a celebration of our shared survival.

But TMVE 2025 also goes beyond Art. It brings people and policymakers together around the real issues shaping adulthood in Ghana and beyond:

🏠 youth employment & creative livelihoods
⚖️ gender equity & the politics of care
🌍 mental health & resilience
🌿 climate anxiety & urban survival
✈️ migration & belonging
💔 grief, loss, and intergenerational healing.

Alongside these, it teaches many things that many creatives are hardly taught, for Creative Entrepreneurship success - how to pitch ideas, apply for funding, build teams, understand contracts, and engage international partners — bridging Art, Advocacy, and Sustainable Living.
Anchored in Ghana, yet connecting Africa, the EU, UK, and the Diaspora, this is where storytelling meets strategy, and Adulthood becomes Art.

📅 28th November – 7th December 2025
📍 Accra • Ghana • Across the Diaspora
Produced by Breathing Art Studio | Curated by Apiorkor Seyiram Ashong-Abbey