Tallulah Patricia Bär

A Zürich-based practitioner working across strategy, culture, learning and public dialogue.

Her professional background spans private banking, international development, education, cultural programming and cross-sector partnerships. She currently works as Project Lead for Future of Work at Impact Hub Zürich and is the founder of AfroSwissters and TheSwissPanAfrican.

Her work has included programme development, partnerships, research, stakeholder engagement, moderation, speaking and editorial projects. She also serves on the Advisory Board of VOLTA Art Fair and is an Asia Society Gen A Fellow.

She holds a BA (Hons) in Politics and International Relations from the University of Westminster and an MSc in African Development from the London School of Economics.

The name began with a sculpture.

At the Saatchi Gallery, I encountered Jorge Mayet's Entre Dos Aguas, a tree suspended between two pieces of earth, its roots exposed and extending across the space between them.

I did not see it as a metaphor for Africa or Europe. I saw something more personal: the possibility of being shaped by more than one place without having to resolve the tension between them. That became one of the ideas behind TheSwissPanAfrican.

Swiss describes where I was born and raised and the institutional context in which much of my work has developed. PanAfrican reflects family, relationships, experience and a long-standing intellectual and personal connection to the African continent and its diasporas, formalised in an MSc in African Development at the London School of Economics.

I registered the domain in 2017, as a student, to put my street photography somewhere. It has moved with me since: from photographs to essays, from essays to conversations, from conversations to the work I now do professionally. The name stayed because the perspective did.

The name is not a claim to represent Africa. It is a description of the perspective from which I work.

My connection to Africa predates TheSwissPanAfrican and is not limited to professional work. My mother is Ghanaian and my father Egyptian. Tanzania became an important part of my life during my studies and beyond, including repeated visits to the Ruvuma region and academic research connected to the country. My undergraduate work in Politics and International Relations also brought questions of development, institutions and international relationships into sharper focus.

Over time, those experiences have sat alongside a career largely based in Switzerland, including work in finance, international development, education, culture and partnerships.

I am interested in what happens when these experiences meet, without assuming that one perspective is more authoritative than another.