Africa Cluster's contents tagged with "cairo working group"

ARAC Goes to documenta fifteen

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 15:02:35 +0000

The contribution of the Another Roadmap School Africa Cluster (ARAC) to documenta fifteen is a sequence of three week-long editorial meetings held in June, July and August 2022 in Kassel, comprising open and closed sessions and contributions to the documenta fifteen public programme.

The editorial meetings are a continuation of ARAC’s Schoolbook Project, a series of five “exercises books”, namely: Provocations Book, Exercises Book, Glossaries Book, Images Book, and a Playlist Book. The five books aim to make accessible the work that ARAC has done and the knowledge that ARAC has produced since 2015. The ARAC’s Schoolbooks are an evolution of the Another Roadmap School’s existing practice of creating “learning units”.

The three editorial meetings are held in a modular setting that attends to ARAC’s chronologies; its genealogies; and its Typologies. The setting was developed through Another Roadmap’s method of “an exhibition kit”: an open-ended method of art making and learning through creating company and fellowship. The setting plays host to works developed through ARAC’s collective methods including the Un/Chrono/Logical Timeline; the Traveling Printing Suitcase that extends the artistic methods of the Medu Art Ensemble, a South African collective that used jazz and poster making in their fight against apartheid; wooden sculptures developed by the staff and students of École d’art de Nyundo as part of the art school pedagogical programme, in an exchange of the context of the study of the school’s history not only through recorded media and books, bu t also through material practice as well. The setting also features further symbolic creative works in various formats and media emerging from ARAC Members’s own practices; rotating entries of works that keep ARAC’s artistic company; and a preview of ARAC’s Images Book presented as a stream of projections across the space.

The public programme, held within and beyond ARAC’s space at Fridskul includes workshops; École du soir or evening programmes made of screenings and discussions; and People Who Think Together Dance Together, a recurring moment of musical gatherings; all of which feature friends and guests of ARAC.

Altogether, ARAC uses documenta fifteen as a welcome opportunity to meet and work together in Kassel to complete first drafts of 3 of the 5 Schoolbooks, but also as a momentous occasion to engage deeply with fellow collectives from across the planet and to develop methods and frameworks for long-lasting mutual exchanges.

“Letter writing as a technology of the past present and futures”: A New Project for 2020

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 13:47:23 +0000

When the project “Letters to/from Cairo, Dehli, Gwangju/Cologne, Johannesburg & Richmond: Letter writing as a technology of the past present and futures” started, the method was a meditation on “Fantasy, Thought, Feeling and Speculation as Action” through a set/suite of questions, prompts and propositions:

How do we, in the year 2020/10 or whenever think of letter writing as a technology of the past present and futures?
How does it look, feel, and dream like to write letters to the past, present and future?
Can letter writing be read as a technology of waiting – waiting as technology of speculation?
This is to say, while waiting for the reply, or even for the ‘letter’ to reach recipients – if it does at all (no blue ticks) – we could speculate.
We don’t only speculate in the mind that wanders/loiters or the heart that yearns and anticipates, but also speculate through translations that invites expansive responses – acts of/in Sebakanyana, Solanka, In The Meantime.
In a hyper-capitalist world of un/paid labour, AI-robotic labour and rising ‘unemployment’, can ‘we’ conceive of waiting as a productive act?
If we dare to conceive such, what are the ethico-political consequences/implications of such a thought act?
Can we write letters to the Moon, Venus, Jupiter – Earth, for the Sebakanyana, Solanka, In The Meantime?

The first call and response in this letter writing began in Johannesburg to Cairo and back to Johannesburg. Poetically, all things considered, it is significant that the very first letters were carried by Rangoato Hlasane (member of Another Roadmap Africa Cluster, Wits School of Arts and Keleketla! Library) to visit the Contemporary Image Collective at the invitation of the Temporary Gathering collective from 10 to 15 March 2020. The embodied mediation deepened the notion of letter writing in practice at the cusp of social distancing. At Temporary Gathering, Rangoato co-led a workshop and mediation on letter writing, as well as deliver a lecture on “post-Apartheid” South Africa’s vernacular visual cultures through the lens of kwaito music videos and their articulation of race, gender and nationalism. The lecture was also part of a ‘print party’ in which all participants continued printing, making and remixing letters to Johannesburg, and of course, as per the tradition of ARAC, taking turns at the mixing desk sharing playlists, dancing together, a volume .0 of ‘People Who Think Together Dance Together’. Throughout what was then unbeknownst to us all the last day of such kind of social/intellectual gatherings, participants made stencils and screens, printing onto a collective banner of a letter. The aim was that this banner will continue to evolve on arrival in Johannesburg...

What is striking is that all the Letters/Responses to/from Johannesburg/Cairo do not engage Covid-19. Rather the Letters/Responses grapple with the tensions, contradictions, ironies and pleasures of correspondence, and serve as a portal to share thoughts and experiences that remain consistent with our time. These include, but are not limited to; intersections of language and race, complexities surrounding biographies and geographies, fault lines of nation-states and citizenship, identity and collective universalism. As the letters to Cairo were welcomed and engaged in Cairo, in Johannesburg the cohort in Drawing and Contemporary Practice III students at Wits School of Arts (University of the Witwatersrand) have turned their horizons towards Dehli, where ongoing protests were unfolding…

Within a few weeks of this seemingly unusual call and response engagement, the planetary universe came to a grip due to the Covid-19. For Rangoato, to travel back home on the day when our country’s president was to address the nation for the first time on Covid-19 and to announce a ‘state of disaster’ was surreal: “I couldn’t access the Cairo Airport Wi-Fi, so there I was with a mask on, Letters to Johannesburg in my carry on luggage, speculating on the president’s speech that took place two hours before boarding… everything was a blurr.”

He arrived to a 14-day self-isolation, including the letters. By the time the letters had reached their own quarantine period, a date for South Africa’s hard national lockdown was announced. While the students had access to photographs of the letters, it became clear that the Letters/Response from Cairo will introduce a level of depth and intensity that none of us could have imagined. The novelty of a ‘letter’ had temporally re-surfaced. The invitation of “Fantasy, Thought, Feeling and Speculation as Action” became charged. Currently, the Drawing and Contemporary Practice III cohort is currently ‘packaging’ Letters/Responses to Cairo, as well as Dehli, Gwangju/Cologne and Virginia, and other geographies…a new Instagram will announce forthcoming blog and the continuing correspondences.

At the beginning, on method, we wrote, and we quote in full:

While we will not do away with the Internet and in person exchanges, we aim to underwrite the exchanges through postal correspondence. Thinking with the Otolith Group’s ‘In the Year of the Quiet Sun’, how do we read the graphics of/on postal stamps as miniature posters? We are reading postage stamp marks as signifiers of where objects have been, as additive layers. How do we read postal stamps as documents of historical, social, mineralogical and epistemic spaces in times and spaces?

We are intrigued by the intrigue generated by something that has to be opened. How do we think of the reader as co-author from not only the point of opening (the ‘letter’ or object/parcel), but also from the space of anticipation/speculation? We are fascinated by the possibility of objects changing in transit. Not only in terms of the eventual change in the shape and form of the object, but also through being stunted in time – the situations and conditions that rendered the ‘letter’ relevant at the time of writing may have changed at the time of departure, during transit and at the time of arrival/reception. These changes may be geological, social, political, personal etc.

While not doing away with English, we wish to complicate the desire and habit of reverting to mono-lingualism (or oppressive bi-lingualism as reflected in the Suid/South Africa postage stamp). This way we can open space to visual, the oral/aural, the mathematical, the comical, the diagrammatical, the chemical etc and to speculate, re-search, re-discover and hopefully re-engage.

Much of what was assumed above changed drastically, yet much remains the same and ‘new’ practices experiences emerged almost immediately, and continues. For example, colleagues at Ambekdar Univeristy Dehli turned inward in their letter writing. Disrupted by the pandemic, lockdown and online learning, the cohort in the MA Visual Art at School of Culture and Creative Expression write letters to each other and to a wide range of phenomena. As they write in their beautiful online manifestation (part of their graduation web exhibition), letter writing became a “a sense of communion” and led to “a collection of love letters to each other”. For course leaders Santosh S and Vidya Shivadas “The question of address also changed—distance, proximity, and duration took on new meanings as did the terms friends and strangers.” While the digital collection of letters evoke a sense of tactility, S and Shivadas point to the provisionality of the medium as an apt “testament to our historical present”. Visit their MA Visual Art exhibition and their Letters Project here.

As the title indicates with reference to correspondences to/from

Cairo, Dehli, Gwangju/Cologne, Johannesburg & Richmond the engagement continues with various intensities and tempos. We look forward to share more on this blog as the correspondences unfold. Indeed, the project’s ambition is to engage with colleagues in Entebbe and Lubumbashi. This project has been and continues to be a significant exercise in temporalities and continuities, so it will continue to be defined by starts and stops; waitings and speculations; arrivals and departures; all bounded by contexts and localities. The letter-writing in the expanded sense premise owes much of its genesis in one of the thematic threads of the Intertwining Histories Cluster of Another Roadmap School (and shout out to the London Working Group in introducing the notion of a ‘Letter to a Future Self’) and practices of the Medu Art Ensemble as revisited by the Another Roadmap Africa Cluster.

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About the 2020 Drawing and Contemporary Practice III

The 2020 Drawing and Contemporary Practice III cohort at Wits School of Arts have been operating as an umbrella of ephemeral collectives, namely: 15172264, Are We Safe, Assume Form, Bayazi, Nagaram, Open Questions, RE: Write and SONA. This umbrella has now given rise to four Fronts, in the light of continuing Covid-19 restrictions namely; Editorial Front, Graphic Front, Digital Pre-Production & Online Space Front and RISOgraph & Bookmaking Front.

The collectives are responding to a constellation of invitations, prompts and provocations under the thematic: Letter writing as a technology of the past present and futures. With colleagues in different parts of the globe, the collectives have been writing letters to, and hopefully receiving responses from Cairo, Dehli, Gwangju/Cologne & Richmond.

While different groups are engaging specific topics and investigations, each group is engaging letter writing as a process of pulling together collective editorial frameworks/questions and sub-questions therein towards publications in the second semester (2nd half of 2020). Each collective’s letter writing exercise serves as beginnings of editorial frameworks/propositions/questions. Each collective is, at the time of writing this, engaging in rigorous editorial processes to contribute to a collective publication, unpacking, expanding and exploring key aspects emerging from the ongoing letters and inviting further exchanges in the process.

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About Temporary Gathering

Temporary Gathering is an educational programme on the history and practice of self-organised forms of publishing organised and taking place at Contemporary Image Collective - CIC in Cairo, Egypt. The programme brings together a group of 10-14 cultural workers with backgrounds in graphic design, photography, cultural theory, poetry, dance and visual arts.

Temporary Gathering consists of group based research and critical discussion of local histories and contemporary practices of self publishing and of making publications by use of affordable means, such as photocopied zines and silkscreen printing. Temporary Gathering is trying to build a context for learning from and through forms of working together collectively and tries to reflect on the role of often dissident, ephemeral and marginal forms of expression in our specific time and place and the related economies and socialities.

Temporary Gathering is interested in learning from each other and trying to develop forms of knowledge exchange through a combination of organised week long workshops facilitated by invited guests and the availability of time and resources for participants to develop, organise or facilitate part of the programme.

Temporary Gathering was initially planned for 8 weeks starting in late January this year. After an interruption in March due to the pandemic, the group continued to gather online for a couple of months and most recently more and more in the space again to print the various projects. In July, the group also decided to build two working groups, one working on documenting and the other on public events that speak to the questions, discussions and print productions made as part of the Temporary Gathering.

Lubumbashi hosts the Cairo and Nyanza Working Groups for an Exhibition, Work Week and Workshop at Waza Art Centre (25 November – 10 December 2018)

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 10:29:42 +0000

The Lubumbashi Working Group invited members of the Cairo and Nyanza working groups to meet them for two weeks at Waza Arts Centre. The invitees were all member of an internal Another Roadmap working group tasked with creating an ‘exhibition kit’ for the Intertwining Hi/Stories cluster, and the aim of this gathering was to continue the reflections and practical explorations they had begun at the International Meeting of the Another Roadmap School in Huye, Rwanda, earlier in the year. They sought primarily to explore the possibilities of materialising and (re)presenting, through an exhibition model, the research, ways of life, practices, protocols, programmes and activities conducted by the network. The meeting in Lubumbashi was attended by members of the Lubumbashi, Nyanza and Cairo Working Groups and consisted of different public and semi public engagements as well as various research meetings.

Talks
30 November 2018
Centre d'Art Waza
At the beginning of our stay, as a means of introducing ourselves to the Waza and by extension larger local community, Rana El Nemr, Andrea Thal and Christian Nyampeta gave a talk about our practice. The talk was followed by a longer Q + A and allowed us to connect to cultural workers active in Lubumbashi.

Exhibition
Tukiwaze Pamoja, Tucheze Pamoja – Recits sur l'education artistique
5 – 22 December 2018
Centre d'Art Waza

The exhibition was the second part of Waza's ongoing “Mitaaki Moments” series. The exhibition brought together materials from the Working Groups of the Africa Cluster and film works by some of the members of the groups meeting in Lubumbashi. It was conceived as a “active space” of dialogue, or a “conversation starter”, that spread throughout the various spaces that form part of Waza, such as the library, garden, central meeting space and storage areas. The exhibition was
opened with a tour by the members of the Working Groups present that took the guests through the different spaces and introduced the material shown and invited to discuss them in relation to the local context in Lubumbashi.

Workshop
Short Conversations on Art and Knowledge - Atef 2.1
Centre d'Innovation and Short Conversations on Art and Knowledge - Ernest Rana El Nemr from the Cairo Working Group facilitated a workshop that discussed the idea of “tools” and alternative education. The workshop was based on a video conversation with Atef, a cultural worker form Cairo, Egypt. During the time in Lubumbashi two meetings and a subsequent video interview for the ongoing series of “short conversations” was recorded with a musician based in Lubumbashi whose practice has shifted from being a live musician to mainly focusing on teaching and mentoring younger musicians. Research Meetings Several reserach meetings were held in the first days of the meeting and again at the very end with teaching staff and students at the Pedagogical University in Lubumbashi as well as with different philosophers based in Lubumbashi.

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DETAILED REPORT

At the meeting in Lubumbashi, this research resulted in creation of an exhibition/soirée called Tukiwaze pamoja, Tucheze pamoja, which comprised an evening programme on 5 December, and an exhibition coponent which was open to the public 5-22 December. These events were conceived of being material – in and of themselves – and also as conceptual explorations of ARAC’s desire to conceive an exhibition kit as an evolving structure and a model adaptable to each context of use. Both the evening event (“soirée”) and the exhibition drew on and shared stories on arts/education gathered from other ARAC locales – namely Nyanza, Johannesburg, Cairo, Kampala, Maseru and Lubumbashi.

Tukiwaze pamoja, Tucheze pamoja is Swahili for ‘those who think together dance together’– which, in its original English form ‘people who think together dance together’, has become something of an ARAC mantra. This saying reflects ARAC’s desire to define models for sharing knowledge that go beyond formal contexts and academic vocabularies, and to integrate various modes of exchange and conviviality into their intellectual work. It also affirms ARAC’s understanding of artistic education as a set of embodied and experiential practices. Tukiwaze pamoja, Tucheze pamoja reflects an idea and attitude, and at the Lubumbashi meeting, it served as a fundamental tenet of the creation of the Another Roadmap ‘exhibition kit.’ Building on the core principles encapsulated by Tukiwaze pamoja, Tucheze pamoja, proposals were developed for how places of (re)presentation such as Waza Art Centre might be thought of as places of knowledge production that is activated by text, music, video, discussions and exchange.

The second tenet to be identified for the exhibition kit was the collaboration with localised initiatives, struggles, artists and schools. In Lubumbashi, this objective was realised by collaborating with Centre d’Innovation de Lubumbashi (Lubumbashi Innovation Center). Additionally, groundwork was made for future collaborations with the Institut Supérieur de Pédagogie de Lubumbashi (ISP).

A third tenet to be identified for the ‘exhibition kit’ was that its users must be afforded the opportunity to add to/select/adapt research results by other working groups to the contexts in which they are mounting an exhibition of the Another Roadmap School. The users of the exhibition kit must enter a dialogue with the working groups whose they wish to adapt or change, and their consent must be sought. For Tukiwaze pamoja, Tucheze pamoja, the Cairo Working Group presented the new iteration of Rana El Nemr’s project, Short Conversations on the Economies of Art and Knowledge. This project is a series of filmed conversations about the economic models at work in artistic practices. It brings together anecdotes, ideological preferences, thoughts and other fragments that help to understand and develop the economic aspects of artistic practices and knowledge sharing. Each video conversation serves as material for a series of workshops where participants add their own experiences to it. The project’s cumulative approach makes it possible to collectively build new versions and combinations of practices and new knowledge architectures. In Lubumbashi, Rana conducted a workshop with members of the Lubumbashi Innovation Center, drawing from her video on the work of Atef Rustum, co-founder of Sabaa Sanayea, an art and design experimentation space in Cairo. Rana also created a new video interview with Ernest Tshibadi, a legendary musician in Lubumbashi.

Christian Nyampeta of the Nyanza Working Group presented his film Sometimes It Was Beautiful for the first time in Africa. Commissioned by Tensta konsthall in Stockholm in 2018, this short fictional film revisits I fetischmannens spar (In the Footsteps of the Witchdoctor, 1949), a film made in the Belgian Congo by the renowned Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist (1922-2006). Nykvist’s film is considered one of the earliest entries in ‘missionary cinema’. In revisiting this phenomenon, its historical contexts and present-day legacies, Nyampeta’s new film invites ‘unlikely friends’ whose only common ground is having been at the Stockholm Ethnography Museum, where a collection of the parents of Sven Nykvist is kept, following their missionary lives in Congo in 1930s. The speculative gathering of unlikely friends who meet to watch and to discuss Nykvist film include: politician Yasser Arafat, postcolonial queer theorist Leela Gandhi, human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú, politician Robert Mugabe, playwright Wole Soyinka and Princess Victoria of Sweden. This premiere in Lubumbashi resulted in a six-hour discussion around the question of the role of contemporary art in the mediation of heritage, repatriation and transcultural memory.

The presentations of the Lubumbashi Working Group at this meeting focussed on their ongoing research project ‘Replay 1970’, which seeks to reconstruct the intellectual life of Lubumbashi in the 1970s. The project gives a particular attention to the life and times of the Centre of Excellence in Human Sciences at the University of Lubumbashi (then Campus de Lubumbashi de l’université nationale du Zaïre). The Centre was at the foreground of the then-raging debates about the decolonisation of knowledge and the place of the African intellectual, and the main protagonists included eminent figures such as V. Y. Mudimbe, Georges Ngal and Johannes Fabian. To this day, the questions and controversies that buzzed from that campus into the city at the time still inspire artistic productions and cultural enquiries in Lubumbashi and beyond. For the exhibition component, a blackboard timeline composition was presented as well as excerpts of an ongoing project of video interviews with the first students of the Fine Arts Institute, such as François Amisi.

The Nyanza Working Group presented an artwork from the series of ‘envelopes’– a set of fabric compositions made of graphic and textual arrangements of intellectual histories, friendships, familial relations and institutional ecologies. The Kampala Working Group (UG) presented a ‘word cloud’ issued from the workshop ‘Decolonising artistic education,’ a staff and curriculum development project that took place at the Nagenda International Academy of Arts and Design (NIAAD) between 2015–2017. The Maseru working group also contributed with the Ba Re e Ne Re dictionary, neologisms and word inventions by young Basotho that render concepts and imaginaries that do not exist in English. In the same vein, the Kinshasa Working Group presented Kin Contempo – a lexicon of collected expressions used by Kinshasa artists to transmit various facets of their reality and the challenges to which they are exposed. Finally, from the Johannesburg Working Group: the making of the 40-meter-long interactive “Un/chronological Timeline” was presented in a graphic montage made of photographic documentation and textual compositions that included the 8 previous iterations of the activations of the Timeline.

ARAC Will Convene for its 3rd Colloquium in Maseru (7-13 January 2017)

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 13:00:51 +0000

ARAC participates in the 2nd NEPAD Regional Conference on Arts Education in Africa (23-27 May 2017)

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:35:39 +0000

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), an economic development program of the African Union, launched regional Arts Education Conferences in 2015 to bring together various stakeholders to share learning experiences and best practices and work together in a consultative manner towards developing a continental framework to guide the implementation of Arts Education in Africa. The 1st Arts Education Conference was held in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2015. Building on the success of this Conference, the 2nd Arts Education Conference took place in Egypt from 23 – 25 May 2017. Dubbed “the Cairo Conference,” it was produced by NEPAD in collaboration with the Government of the Arab Republic of Egypt. The Cairo Conference sought to promote the cultivation of innovation and creativity for social cohesion and a unified economy. It highlighted the importance of using indigenous cultural expressions to develop the thinking and problem-solving skills of African learners and researchers.

During the Cairo Conference, participating countries delivered national reports on participation rates in Arts Education across the spectrum from the lower levels all the way to tertiary level, review of Education Policy and how it approaches Arts Education, status of Learning, Teaching, Support Material (LTSM) on Arts Education (including E-learning materials), advocacy and formalization of Arts Education in Curricula as well as assessing teacher support in this area to improve teaching of the Arts.

David Andrew (Johannesburg Working Group) and Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa (Kampala Working Group) both attended as speakers, with support from the floor from the Cairo Working Group.

Africa Cluster Colloquium 2 (April 2017) Public Programme

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 14:14:40 +0000

The Another Roadmap Africa Cluster held their Second Colloquium from 3-7 April, 2017. We reserved the Thursday and part of the Friday for public events hosted at the Wits University School of Arts and School of Education.

Highlights

Thursday 6 April, 8-11am, Public timeline making event at Wits School of Education

ARAC members were invited to create a timeline that was juxtaposed with the history of visual arts in South Africa and the world at large. In this exercise, people added dates that held significance to them personally or in their work in order to demonstrate how history intertwines and mark one's place as part of history.

Lunch:13.15 – 4pm, Wits School of Arts (The Point Of Order)

Members introduced themselves and shared their research and experiences with the public. The timeline created earlier in the day was rolled out on the floor as part of the conversation and a symbolic representation of what brought the different working groups together. The gathering included an interactive writing exercise as well as music session to help bring working groups and audience members closer together.

Friday 7 April

1.15 – 4pm, Semi-Public: The Point of Order
Wits School of Arts Fine Arts ‘Drawing & Contemporary Practice’ III: 3rd year student made presentations on Medu Art Ensemble Newsletters in groups. The activity was followed by casual discussions between working groups and students about archiving, recovering and disseminating knowledge.

Evening: 6pm onwards, public
The cluster hosted a reception and dance party to wrap up the weeklong discussion, presentations and deliberations. Every member was invited to play a DJ set as part of the mutual exchange and connectivity of the group. The event offered everyone the chance to recap on an intense yet fruitful week while brainstorming ideas for the way forward.