Africa Cluster's contents tagged with "nyanza 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.

Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) participation in the #Im4thearts Capacity Building Winter School (22-24 June 2020)

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 14:32:11 +0000

Formed in January 2020, #Im4theArts is an artist-led movement for the rights of all workers in the South African arts sector with 18,000 Facebook and 800 formally registered members that are working for accountability and economic sustainability in the creative sector. The #Im4theArts Winter School was a response to members’ needs for capacity-building. As part of the Winer School, ARAC members Christian Nyampeta (Nyanza Working Group) and David Andrew (Johannesburg Working Group) participated in the first of three online Zoom sessions on the State of Arts Education in South Africa.

Speaking first, David Andrew offered an account of the process that resulted in the UNESCO Road Map for Arts Education. He did this with reference to the aims of the document presented at the World Conference on Arts Education in Lisbon, 2006, and the subsequent world conference whose findings are recorded in ‘The Seoul Agenda: Goals for the Development of Arts Education’ (2010). David ended his presentation with a discussion of Michael Wimmer’s blog piece titled From “The Seoul-Agenda” to “Another Road-Map for Arts Education” (March 2018) in which he acknowledges the deep-set problematics of the UNESCO processes and identifies the work of ARAC as constructively addressing these concerns.

Christian Nyampeta then went on to sketch the history and genesis of the history of the Another Roadmap School and the Africa Cluster in particular, spotlighting our efforts to supplement and critique the UNESCO processes, emphasising our focus on the histories of art/s education and our commitment to producing and sharing knowledge in forms that can be used meaningfully in African teaching and learning environments.

Nyanza Working Group launches «École du Soir» (February 2020)

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 16:19:38 +0000

École du soir (Evening School, EDS for short) is a multiform hosting structure for collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action. EDS is convened by artist Christian Nyampeta, with the support of and alongside a chorus of fellow artists, institutions, and networks.

The structure of this “evening school” draws from Senegalese writer and film director Ousmane Sembène, who saw cinema as cours du soir or “evening classes”. Informed by the traditions of orality, sensuality and conviviality within the realm of art learning and making in his region. He viewed cinema as a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience and public dissemination, employing a methodology concerning the use of cinema’s collective production, and investing in viewing methods that drew from different uses of time, visual and textual histories, social struggles and hopes, in mutuality between his own locality and the world at large.

École du soir has a new website, https://evening-school.org/, made possible with the European Union Prize at Rencontres de Bamako that Nyampeta won in 2019. The website will include listings of past, current and future programmes and iterations of EDS, alongside digital resources, libraries, playlists, and online screenings. It also features a dedicated live platform for streaming live events and performances. Additionally, EDS will introduce an invitation-based distribution channel for pedagogical use in the near future

YOU CAN GET INVOLVED!

The resources of École du soir are available not only to the members and working groups of ARAC but also to any other people who wish to host events in their own contexts. Since it was launched at the ARAC-ARA Symposium on Artistic Education in Africa in Johannesburg in February 2020, EDS has already been shared in Kampala, New York, and in Maseru.

The only precondition is that the organisers of Écoles du soir are asked to feed back their experiences using this web platform so that their insights will contribute to the widening of the networks and communities of practice concerned and confronted with similar issues. For more information, contact Em Joseph at em@ecoledusoir.net

This was the programme for the inaugural École du soir, which unfolded over the course of five evenings during the ARAC-ARA Symposium on Artistic Education in Africa in Johannesburg in February 2020.

FILM

DURATION

THEMATIC

Atlantics, Mati Diop, 2019

Arrivals and Departures

O Horizon (Excerpt), The Otolith Group

5 min

Pedagogies

Behind the Words, Clementine Dusabejambo, 2015

21 min

Tatsunia, Rahima Gambo, 2017

7 min

AmaHubo, Buhlebezwe Siwani, 2018

13 min

Urumuli, Abdoul Mujyambere, 2018

4 min

Dance and Movements

Ishimwa: From Bloodshed to Grace, Cynthia Butare, 2017

15 min

Nothing like that is ever going to happen to me again

9 min

(but if it does, at least now I have tools), Ogemdi Ude, 2019

This is America / Sherrie Silver, 2018

8 min

A Walk, Rahima Gambo, 2018

5 min

After the Finish Line, Adelita Husni-Bey, 2015

13 min

King Who, Amelia Umuhire, 2019

6 min

Memories and Legacies

Sometimes It Was Beautiful, Christian Nyampeta, 2018

37 min

The Body’s Legacy: The Postcolonial Body, Kader Attia, 2019

50 min

Diagnosis

Promised Lands, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, 2015

23 min

Search Sweet Country, Christian Nyampeta, 2019

30 min

Performance of Methods

(Optional)

Further Suggestions

Keza Lyn, Philibert-Aimé Mbabazi, 2018

27 min

Fictions

She, Ndimbira Shenge Claudine, 2016

12 min

Nyanza Working Group meets with anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana at Sculpture Center and e-flux in New York (14 – 26 October, 2019)

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 13:36:49 +0000

In October 2019, the Nyanza Working Group convened a work week in New York that brought Isaïe Nzeyimana from Huye in Rwanda to New York, where he attended and led interpretation workshops of his own French writing that is being translated collectively into English for the first time.

The week culminated in; An Evening with Philosopher Isaïe Nzeyimana, in Dialogue with Anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana and Artist Christian Nyampeta’ - an event which explored Nzeyimana’s philosophical writing and reflections from Chicago-based anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana, who studies the everyday aftermath of violence, how violence occupies the spatial memory of the landscape and what kinds of individual and societal narratives allows and disavows memories of violence. The evening concluded with a panel discussion led by Nyampeta that explored the place of memories in the project of living together in the history of the present.

Further information is available on Sculpture Center.

Nyanza Working Group convenes a Conference at Kagbayi Grand Seminary Philosophicum St Thomas Aquinas for UNESCO World Philosophy Day (23 January 2019)

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 13:44:24 +0000

In January 2019, Christian Nyampeta and Isaie Nzeyimana of the Nyanza Working Group co-convened a conference on the occasion of World Philosophy Day, an event organized annually by the National Commission of UNESCO, in collaboration with ARPHI (the Association Rwandaise des Philosophes).

This year’s theme was the relationship between art and philosophy, and it was hosted by the Grand Séminaire Philosophicum de Kabgayi St. Thomas Aquinas. Guests included Archbishop Smaragde Mbonyintege, Senator Laurent Nkusi, members of the philosophers’ association, artists, and faculty from various universities.

The Postcard Method

The majority of the guests were current students of the Grand Seminary, who are future priests. The conference was organized following what Nzeyimana and Nyampeta call the “postcard method.” In the preceding months, they visited artists and philosophers across the country, and they held recorded conversations with our hosts on themes of translation, memory, and education. During the conference—with the use of two simultaneous projectors—we screened the results, with audio and video fragments on one projector, and highlights from the transcripts of their visits on the other.

World Philosophy Day, Kabgayi, Rwanda, January 23, 2019. Convened by Dr. Isaïe Nzeyimana and Christian Nyampeta. Organized by UNESCO, Kabgayi Philosophicum, and ARPHI.

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

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

Our Common Ghosts: the Nyanza and Kampala Working Groups Meet at the Venice Biennale (May 2017)

Wed, 10 May 2017 12:46:04 +0000

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.