Symposium

Where We Meet – Cultural Translation and Art in Social Transformation

Talks in the context of "prêt-à-partager –Art Fashion Sports" being exhibited at the ifa gallery Berlin

Tuesday 5th of June 2012 6.00 pm

&

Wednesday 6th of June 2012 6.30 pm

Symposium venue: Werkstatt der Kulturen, Wissmannstrasse 32, 12049 Berlin

close to the metro station Hermannplatz

The last years have seen the establishment of an ever-growing transnational network of African artists and curators, who proactively founded and run art spaces in their home towns. 

The symposium sheds a light on the role of these initiatives with regard to their influence on social transformations as well as the challenges of cultural translation processes that the actors encounter.

in English / free and open to the public

Tuesday, 5th of June 2012, 6:00 pm 

Theme: Cultural Translation

Address of Welcome by Elke aus dem Moore - Head of the Visual Arts Department of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, Stuttgart     

Chaired by Onur Suzan Kömürcü Nobrega – Lecturer and Ph.D. Candidate, Goldsmiths, University of London

•             Panel:

Ntone Edjabe - Founder and Editor of Chimurenga, Douala and Cape Town

Koyo Kouoh – Founder and Artistic Director of RAW MATERIAL COMPANY, Dakar (tbc)

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim – Writer, Film Maker, Cultural Historian, London and Accra

Lizza May David - Artist and Co-founder of Global Alien, Berlin

Kemang Wa Lehulere - Artist and Co-founder of Gugulective (2006) and the Center for Historical Reenactements (CHR), Johannesburg

•             Lecture with Françoise Vergès - 8:00 pm

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley; Political scientist and Consultant at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

Wednesday, 6th of June 2012, 6:30 pm 

Theme: Art in Social Transformation

Chaired by Marie-Hélène Gutberlet – Ph.D. Film Scholar, Writer and Curator

Panel:

Bisi Silva - Founder and Artistic Director of the Center for Contemporary Art Lagos

Patrick Mudekereza - Founder and Artistic Director of Picha ASBL, Lubumbashi

Gió Di Sera - Co-founder of Streetunivercity, Berlin

Didier Schaub – Co-founder and Artistic Director of Doual’art, Douala

•             11pm Party with DJ Ntone Edjabe - venue:  Club Gretchen, Obentrautstr. 19-21, Berlin Kreuzberg (U7, U6 Mehringdamm, Hallesches Tor)

www.gretchen-club.de

Admission: 5 Euro

This symposium will take place in the context of prêt-à-partager – Art Fashion Sports being exhibited at the ifa gallery Berlin – 26.4.-8.7.2012.

www.ifa.de

http://www.werkstatt-der-kulturen.de/

Media Partner http://www.africavenir.org/

Conceptualised and curated by:

Elke aus dem Moore, Aïcha Diallo, Sandrine Micossé-Aikins

Project Management:

Sabina Husičić

PR:

Aïcha Diallo

Abstract – Françoise Vergès

In my lecture, I will talk about what I call “cartographies of invisible lives”, not national cartographies but those traced through history by slaves, indentured workers, migrants, exiles..., as well as plants, songs, ideas..., and about intangible culture and their cultural expressions. “Cultural Translation and Art for Social Transformation” is thus seen as ephemeris, temporary installations reflecting the constant adaptation of the “living”. It is art that seeks to contribute to social debate, not a prescriptive model, away from moralistic discourse, instead looking at conflicts, expressions of hatred and envy to find how and where common ground can be found.

Abstract – Kemang Wa Lehulere

"Script for an unfaithful translation:

Like writing your own song please decide your own tempo while licking a mirror with all your tongues. Does your mirror have a memory? What does your tongue feel? Can it taste the mirror? Is the feeling mutual, symbiotic even? Would the blank pages be loyal to history? Or will black hand resuscitate time when all have retracted to a wordless world?"

The work engages with notions of subjectivity and translation and the possible unfaithfulness of the act of translating. I will enter a portion of the text "Dog Sleep" as a way of translating it physically/performatively. It consists of the literal and metaphoric dissection of the text.

Abstract – Lizza May David

"Io am en vogel”  - language games and other projects by Global Alien

What does it mean to create a non - hierarchical language? Like any form of communication, language remains highly context-specific. What happens if we alienate the context and disembody its speaker? Can we use this "mess" as a starting point for an artistic work?

Lizza May David will present some of Global Alien’s projects, which deal with the fragmentary effect of globalisation and cultural diversity. Working with aesthetic visibilities of social and urban realities, Global Alien’s approach is to invent ways of communication, where the audience is invited to participate in play and game-like performances. The aim of each action is to create conditions of performativity to show how identities and power relations are being constructed.  Global Alien’s current collaborators are: Youngjoo Cho, Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen, Lizza May David, Marte Kiessling, Nam-See Kim, Jae-Hyun Yoo.

Abstract  - Nana Oforiatta-Ayim

The Cultural Encyclopaedia will be a 54-volume encyclopaedia of the cultural trajectories of each of the countries of Africa. It is a translation, into African contexts, of Diderot's amalgamation of ideas, that together proved boundary-shifting and revolutionary, whilst less effectual when dispersed. To this day, cultural notions from the African continent are mistranslated or even considered absent, because they are expressed in different ways. The Encyclopaedia will bring together the works of cultural operators from each country in order to reflect on and enquire into the nature of their historical and contemporary foundations, trajectories and potentialities in this moment of renegotiation for the continent.

Abstract  - Ntone Edjabe

Why a new paper?

In which ways do people live their lives with joy and creativity and beauty, sometimes amidst suffering and violence, and sometimes perpendicular to it? How do people fashion routines and make sense of the world in the face of the temporariness or volatility that defines so many of the arrangements of social existence here? These questions loom over a contemporary Africa. Yet most knowledge produced on the continent remains heavily reliant on simplistic and rigid categories, the bulk of it unable to capture the complexities and ambivalences that inflect so much of contemporary quotidian life here.

During 2011 Chimurenga produced a publishing project in the form of a one-off, one-day-only edition of a fictional pan-African newspaper. Titled the Chimurenga Chronic, the project was published in collaboration with Nigeria’s Cassava Republic Press and Kenya’s Kwani Trust, and distributed across several African cities.

An intervention in both time and space, it embraced the newspaper as the medium best capable of inhabiting, reproducing and interpreting political, social and cultural life in places where uncertainty and turbulence, unpredictability and multidirectional shifts are the forms taken, in many instances, by daily experience.

Employing reportage, creative non-fiction, autobiography and analysis to offer a detailed, vivid and richly textured engagement of everyday life, The Chronic told stories of a complicated ordinariness.

Featured articles included the Benin-Nigeria okrika trade, Somali's capital in Nairobi, a portrait of Juba, the story of a border fence, Cameroon's bass culture, the adventures of Dr Evil in Dakar, the Kenyan long-distance runner, a visual history of Thing Fall Apart and many, many more.

The response was testimony to the success of the project. Accolades poured in. South Africa’s Mail & Guardian described The Chronic as “a cracker. The sort of newspaper you want to open at the end of every week.” Simon Kuper writing in the Financial Times described it as “better than The New Yorker.”

The congratulations were still ringing in our ears when we realised the irony. The Chronic may well have been the newspaper African readers wanted to open every week but clearly they wouldn’t be doing that.  The Chronic was a one-off - not a newspaper but an art project, the performance of a newspaper. Here today, gone tomorrow, it appeared as a spectacle that came dangerously close to perpetuating the very thing it sought to critique. It presented Africa as a land of never-ending present and instant, where today and now matter more than tomorrow, let alone the distant future.

This negated the true value of the newspaper, the very thing that drew us to the medium in the first place: its ability to be present, to create the effect of presence in the present while simultaneously moving through different temporal orders, instrumentalising spatial fragmentation and creating a point of transition from the past to the future. 

So why leave it there? We clearly do not lack the talent, the ingenuity or the voices to tell our own story. Nor do we lack the readership - Africa is hungry for intelligent and challenging writing that takes seriously the task of uncovering the stories that underpin our current condition. We have in place the networks of circulation to move ideas and distribute goods in innovative ways.

What is missing is the bravery to challenge prescribed modes of production that favour one-off projects. To do this we must take seriously the rules, regularities, the reproductive logics and the labour involved in making everyday life possible – despite the conditions of precariousness and uncertainty that continue surround us.  We need to draw on the way African societies compose and invent in the present and embrace our capacity to continually produce something new and singular.

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Abstract – Bisi Silva

Can Art Transform Society?

In which way can artists use their art as a ways to impact on their society? What are the strategies and formats that are implicated in such a vision? My contribution will focus on the way in which the Centre for Contemporary art, Lagos as one of the few independent contemporary art organisations in Lagos provides a platform for art that socially engaged art. This will be highlighted through the example of one or two projects as well as the work of political and social activist, Jellili Atiku through his performance art.

Abstract - Patrick Mudekereza

I will talk about Picha (the biennale and the art center) and its appropriation of history and urban and mental space in the context of the city of Lubumbashi. The idea is to question notions of the attractiveness of this space in order to posit another way of assessing work on the imaginary. In an industrial area such as the one where we work, attractiveness is defined in economic terms and creativity is sidelined. But industry itself and the notion of community and work it generates brings with it a history and a restructuring of society that only creativity can perceive.

Abstract – Gio Dì Sera

the topic and format & the title :

Die StreetUnivercity Berlin als soziale Skulptur  ( Der Dritte Weg der Bildung )

StreetUniverCity® Berlin (SUB) e.V. is a non-governmental educational association (private cooperating with public) focusing on a social, physical, cultural and art education programme for socially disadvantaged youth and young adults.

Our main aims are to help young people from deprived areas increase their self-esteem by showing them that they CAN achieve something, that they can develop a certain status and dignity based on skills, capabilities and knowledge, and not on physical strength or age. Finally to help them take their lives into their hands and enable to choose and start a professional career. The association was founded by Giò Di Sera, ErhanEmre and Martin Kesting in Berlin Kreuzberg 2006 and is led by President Gio Di Sera and Executive Director Philip Marcel.

Overall objectives:

The StreetUniverCity  Berlin does not accept the fact that the social and creative potential of at-risk youth (migrants and non-migrants) is scarcely used or developed. From our point of view, this situation is degrading both for the young people and for society.

We believe that our society needs these young people to fulfill their potential and that they must therefore be challenged and supported. SUB is not a school, a university or professional training centre but rather an informal, extracurricular teaching and learning programme. Our work is based on co-operation with mentors and role models that come from the young people´s social and cultural backgrounds. SUB believes that the lack of identification with society is caused by the absence of future perspectives and young people´s lack of hope. The young people are actively involved in developing educational content and organising projects. We are a democratic, secular organisation, not affiliated with any political party. Our work is based on the Declaration of Human Rights by the UN. These Rights are universal and can never be negotiable. StreetUniverCity Berlin fights against all forms of exclusion, racism, political or religious extremism and anti-semitism. One of our main objectives is the promotion of equality between women and men and providing further information on this aspect.

Structure of the organization:

non-profit organization (e.V.) based in a youth culture centre in Berlin-Kreuzberg. SUB is a non-governmental, educational organisation focusing on a social, physical, cultural and art education programmes for young people from deprived areas.

Most important activities:

We focus on the universal development of individual creativity. Our main aims are to help young people from socially disadvantaged areas choose and start a professional career, to increase their self-esteem by showing them that they CAN achieve something, that they can develop a certain status and dignity based on skills, capabilities and knowledge and not on physical strength or age, and finally to help them take their lives into their hands. Once all qualifications have been fulfilled students will receive a degree entitled ‘StreetMaster’.There are a certain number of compulsory and optional courses and workshops. Global street culture is given a new value by being integrated in our schedule, such as street art, hiphop culture & underground youth scenes.

_The ‘Master of StreetUniverCity’ is awarded to candidates who complete all compulsory courses. This degree, certified by the State of Berlin and famous personalities, informs and proves the future employer of the creative and social potential of the applicant.

_SUB Students are trained to pass on what they have learned; motivated ‘alumni’ will return and support members in this way, a continual training programme will be ensured. A non-profit association was established and a non-profit foundation should be founded in the future.

StreetUniverCity is also a label for street culture.

We are proud to have HipHop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa (Zulu Nation/NY), Joy Denalane (Berlin)/’German Soulqueen’, Cem Özdemir (Berlin)/politician, Benno Fürmann/movie actor, Sibel Kekilli/movie actress, HipHop group Culcha Candela (Berlin) and other well-known local and international role models as SUBporters. They represent and support the spirit and progress for what StreetUniverCity stands for.

SUB has an internationally oriented network involving various partners from different urban art & media scenes in Berlin, Europe and the US.

Working methods:

Module and credit system: the young people make their own schedule and collect credits. There are a certain number of compulsory and optional courses (mostly projects). The ‘MASTER OF STREETUNIVERCITY’ degree will be awarded to the candidates who complete all compulsory courses. An exam can be taken in form of a public performance/presentation/exhibition and/or a cultural production. Examples of the student’s work could be enclosed with the certificate. Other certificates will be awarded for students who only finish parts of the programme. We count on the active support of mentors and (prominent) role models, ‘respect-persons’ (SUBporters), from the cultural backgrounds of the young people. Work placements/internships represent an important part of the programme. They could be possibly organised in the form of voluntary work which would be certified by the State of Berlin. Attendance for the young people who still attend school will be voluntary.

_bases its programme on the characteristics and needs of the area while developing a global approach

_combines cultural, social and international youth work with a vocational training programme, provides extracurricular education and training as part of lifelong learning uses English and German as working languages

_there are no special entry requirements

_is based on co-operation with mentors and role models that come from the young people’s social and cultural background

_We also are regularly promoting and producing music and cultural events (HipHop JAMS, among other things). Professional musicians support our project. They are also important role models for the youth as they have proven success in public, presenting themselves.

Abstract – Didier Schaub

Transformations of the city

The contemporary art center doual’art was founded twenty-one years ago in Douala, Cameroon.

Douala, Cameroon’s economic capital and most populous city, has no cultural facilities whatsoever. This city of close to four million inhabitants does not have a single museum, entertainment venue, concert hall, cinema, or public library. The megalopolis, whose population in 1961, the year of Cameroon’s independence, was 300,000, has grown exponentially without being able to put infrastructure in place to accompany this growth. “Informal” settlements proliferate unchecked and, today, a majority of the city’s population does not have access to basic services.

doual’art was born in this context and specializes in the relationship between contemporary art and urban development. L’Espace doual’art is a space for the visual arts as well as a documentation center specializing in art, architecture, and urban planning. The real defining character of the center, however, is the way in which it intervenes systematically into public urban space, whether it be the city as such or the shantytowns on its outskirts.

Since the first « Ars &Urbis » symposium hosted by doual’art in 2005, which brought together a panel of artists, curators, architects, and urban planning researchers and decision makers, the center’s program of activities has been based on a three-year cycle, culminating in an international triennial festival of public art, the Salon Urbain de Douala, SUD. The « Ars &Urbis » symposia, which set the stage for and accompany the SUD festivals, are periodically organized by doual’art.

For a period of three years, public art projects are conceived in dialogue with and, most of the time, involvement of the inhabitants of the concerned neighborhoods. The completed projects are then officially unveiled during the SUD festival, during which artists can also submit proposals for public art events.

In order to insure local residents’ acceptance of their work, the contributing Cameroonian and international artists are invited to perform public « immersions » in the early stages of conceiving their projects before they install them in a specific place.

It is with this strategy that doual’art has produced more than fifty objects—sculptures, installations, lightweight structures, gardens, and street furniture—and positioned them in the public urban space of Douala, thus transforming the city and the way the inhabitants perceive it.

The introduction of artistic works into a city like Douala gives rise to a whole range of questions on the impact of this kind of occupation of public space, the strength of social ties, social diversity, international social networks, urban tourism, and the transformation of the inhabitants’ imaginations.

In addition, in a country where education is utterly devoid of any attempt to foster critical reasoning and where knowledge of modern history is deliberately obscured, the issues tackled by the artists and the glimpses into the city’s history presented on nearly twenty pieces of street furniture contribute to the creation of civic awareness among the population of Douala.

     

Short bios

Lizza May David (b. 1975, Philippines) lives and works in Berlin. She studied Fine Arts in Nuremberg, Lyon and Media Arts in Berlin and works on issues of memory and nationhood. Her research-based practice ranges from video to installation and explores strategies of image production, labour and ideological worlds. Since 2007 she has collaborated as a member of the artist group Global Alien. Recent exhibitions include: On Surface, Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila (2012); Being on the move: Reflections on migration, Litmus Community Space, Seoul (2011); Nothing to Declare, Blanc Compound, Manila (2011);  Endlos umstritten, ewig schön, D21 Kunstraum, Leipzig (2011); Beyond Re:production, Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien Berlin (2011).

Gio Dì Sera

Born in Italy, Gió Di Sera has been based in Berlin since 1986. Since 1984, Di Sera has been working as a multimedia artist involved in a number of international solo and group shows and performances. In 1992 he created the project ‘To stay here is my right posse’ against racism and intolerance in co-operation with the youth centre Naunynritze. In 2007 he initiated and co-founded the acclaimed youth project Streetunivercity (aka SUB), in Berlin-Kreuzberg; in 2012 he co-implemented the Juniorvercity as integral to SUB. Di Sera has been the recipient of some distinguished awards such as the Mete-Eksi award (1993 and 1994), the Freiherr-vom Stein award of the Töpfer Foundation for Societal Innovation (2009); he was also appointed as Ambassador for Democracy and Tolerance by the Union (Bündnis) Democracy and Tolerance.

Ntone Edjabe is the founder and editor of Chimurenga, a pan-African publication of writing, art and politics. He also co-edits the African Cities Reader and co-curates the Pan African Space Station. He also works as a DJ and artistic director of Tagore's jazz bar in Cape Town. He lives between Douala and Cape Town. 

Writer and curator Marie-Hélène Gutberlet (*1966) studied Art History, Philosophy and Film Studies in Frankfurt/Main and Basel (Ph.D.). Gutberlet was a lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Frankfurt. Gutberlet is co-founder of the experimental film programme ‘reel to real’ (www.realtoreal.de/) based in Frankfurt. She also co-initiated the current project Migration & Media (www.migrationandmedia.com/) with platforms in Frankfurt/Main, Bamako and Johannesburg.  Gutberlet has numerous publications, magazine contributions and editorial work in relation to African Cinema, experimental and documentary films and film in artistic contexts under her belt, as follows: among others

•             Shoe Shop, co-edited with Cara Snyman (2012; accompanying the Shoe Shop Exhibition in Johannesburg; www.shoeshopproject.co.za/)

•             Die Kunst der Migration, Aktuelle Positionen zum europäisch-afrikanischen Diskurs (Material, Gestaltung, Kritik), co-edited with Sissy Helff (2011)

Patrick Mudekereza is an author and a cultural operator from Lubumbashi in DR Congo. With Sammy Baloji, photographer, he created and he runs the association Picha ASBL, which works in the field of visual arts and participates in advocacy for the status of artists in Congolese civil society. He is involved in many artistic activities, initiated and participated in the implementation of several events and structures in visual art, music, theatre, literature and cinema. In parallel to these actions of creation and cultural management, he studied civil engineering and graduated in industrial chemistry from the Polytechnic Faculty of the University of Lubumbashi. He has been professionally engaged in the cultural sector since 2004, when he worked as an editor of cultural magazine Nzenze, general secretary of Vicanos and Project Manager of forum citoyen de la jeunesse organized with the support of the European Union. He was involved in the administration and programming of visual arts in Halle de l’Etoile, French Cultural Centre in Lubumbashi. He also leads the biennial of image arts Picha, the third edition of which will be held in October 2012.

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim is a writer, filmmaker and cultural historian who grew up in Ghana, Germany and the UK. After studying Russian Literature and Politics, she worked for the Eastern European Section of United Nations in New York. She returned to the UK to do an MA in African Art History and received an AHRC award for doctoral research into historical aesthetic and philosophical concepts of the Akan in Ghana. Her works deal with the construction of narratives and identity, as well as language and the play of power. She has presented it across various platforms: She has created books and films for exhibitions at The New Museum, New York; Neue Gesellschaft fürBildende Kunst, Berlin, and The Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; has written for publications, such as African Metropolitan Architecture, The National Geographic, frieze, and The Statesman; has presented her scholarship at the Universities of Legon, Oxford, Cambridge and London; curated exhibitions and events at museums and institutions including The Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Festival Hall and Liverpool Biennial; and has broadcast for HBO, BBC and Vox Africa.

Didier Schaub,

Cultural producer and curator.

•             Co-founder of doual’art, a centre for contemporary art in Douala, Cameroon, in 1991. Artistic director of the centre.

•             Jury member of the Forum des Arts, Libreville 2002 and 2003, co-curator at the Dakar Biennial 2004, president of the jury for the International Symposium of Monumental Sculpture in Libreville 2005.

•             Consultant for the European Commission and head of contemporary art department of Central Africa Proculture Program 2000-2004, curator and member of the sculpture jury for the 6th Francophony Games, 27th September-6th October 2009, Beirut, Lebanon.

•             Artistic director and co-curator of the first edition of the Salon Urbain de Douala, SUD 2007, an international public art festival.

SUD 2007 is also a triennial urban programme of cultural and artistic activities directed and designed by doual’art. By transforming Douala into a case study, SUD facilitates site-specific productions, documents art initiatives within the urban space and gives international visibility to the most experimental projects produced in Cameroon.

•             Artistic director and co-curator of the second edition of the Salon Urbain de Douala, SUD 2010, and the third edition, SUD 2013, planned in December 2013.

•             Last publications:

- KokoKomégné, Survivre et frapper,

Editions du CCF Blaise Cendrars, 2006, Douala.

- Biographie du Prince René Douala Manga-Bell, 

AfricAvenir/Exchange & Dialogue, 2007, Berlin.

- Douala in Translation,

Episode Publishers, 2007, Rotterdam.

- Guide touristique de Douala, historique et artistique,

Doual’art, 2009, Douala.

- Trimestriel «Liquid »,

Editoriaux, de janvier 2009 à décembre 2010, Doual’art, Douala.

- Ato Malinda, l’Ondine,

Contact Zones NRB-04, Goethe Institut Kenya, 2011, Nairobi.

Bisi Silva is an independent curator and the founder and director of Centre for Contemporary Art,Lagos (CCA,Lagos), which opened in December 2007.  She was co-curator of J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere:Moments of Beauty, Kiasma, Helsinki (April-Nov2011). She was co-curator for the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece, ‘Praxis: Art in Times of Uncertainty’, September 2009. In 2006 Silva was one of the curators for the Dakar Biennale in Senegal.  At CCA, Lagos, she has curated Fela, Ghariokwu Lemi and The Art of the Album Cover, 2007,  Ndidi Dike, Waka-into-bondage: The Last ¾ Mile (2008), ‘Like A Virgin...’, Lucy Azubuike(NIG) and Zanele Muholi (SA)(2009), J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere; Sartorial Moments and The Nearness of Yesterday (2010) and All We Ever Wanted (2011). Silva has participated in several international conferences and symposia and written essays for many publications as well as for international art magazines and journals such as Artforum, M Metropolis, Third Text, The Exhibitionist, and is on the editorial board of N Paradoxa, an international feminist art journal.   In 2010 she was the Independent Curators International (ICI) inaugural touring curator. She has been the recipient of several prestigious international fellowships and residencies including Clark/Mellon Curatorial Fellowship at Clark Art Institute, MA, 2011, IASPIS Curatorial Residency, Sweden 2010, HIAP/FRAME, Curatorial Residency, Finland, 2006 &2009. She is a recipient of the Getty International Travel Grant to the 100th CAA Conference 2012 as well as the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Programme, Italy, in July 2012.

Onur Suzan Kömürcü Nobrega teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London,and is a fellow of the ZEIT-Stiftung, Hamburg. She is currently completing her PhD research about cultural diversity in the arts policies and precarious and racialised artistic labour in the case of the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in Berlin. Her research interests include Cultural Studies, Critical Race Studies, Cultural Policy, Postcolonial Studies and Art and Performance Theory.

Françoise VERGÈS is currently consulting at the Center for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is president of the Comité pour la Mémoire et l’Histoire de l’Esclavage (www.cpmhe.fr).

Françoise Vergès was an activist for feminist and human rights and a writer in France before getting her degree at Berkeley in Political Theory. She has written on vernacular practices of memories, on slavery and the economy of predation, the ambiguities of French abolitionism, French republican colonialism, colonial and postcolonial psychiatry in the French colonial empire, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, French postcoloniality, postcolonial museography, the routes of migration and processes of creolization in the Indian Ocean world.  She has worked with filmmakers and artists – Isaac Julien, Yinka Shonibare, Arnaud Ngatcha – and was a project advisor for Documenta 11 in 2002. Between 2003 and 2010, Françoise Vergès was Head of Scientific and Cultural Development and Program of Maison des civilizations et de l’unité réunionnaise (www.mcur.re). Launched in 1999 by Reunion Island Regional Council, funded by Reunion Island Regional Council, the French State and the European Community, the MCUR’s objectives were: to valorize intangible culture, the millenary world of exchanges and encounters in the Indian Ocean between Asia, Africa, the Muslim World and Europe, the processes and practices of creolization the dynamic of centres and peripheries through history, and cultural creativity in the contact zones of migrations. Françoise Vergès wrote with Crapanin Marimoutou the founding report on the scientific and cultural objectives of the project, followed the architectural contest, and worked closely with the architects and scenographers. She developed the notions of “Museum without Objects” and of “Six Worlds”: African, Malagasy, European, Hindu, Muslim, Chinese, which have made the indiaoceanic world. In March 2010, the newly elected conservative majority at Reunion Island Regional Council voted to withdraw its investment in the MCUR project and to stop all actions of the MCUR team.

Among her most recent publications:

•             L’Homme prédateur. Ce que nous enseigne l’esclavage sur notre temps (2011).

•             Ruptures postcoloniales. Les nouveaux visages de la société française avec Nicolas Bancel, Florence Berbault, Pascal Blanchard, Ahmed Boubakeur, et Achille Mbembe (2010).

•             “Figures of a Superfluous Humanity,” Exhibition Jardin d’amour, YinkaShonibare, Musée du Quai Branly, 2007.

•             La Mémoire enchaînée. Questions sur l’esclavage. Paris: Albin Michel, 2006. Françoise Seligman Award against Racism.

•             La république coloniale: essai sur une utopie, with Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel. Paris: Albin Michel, 2003. Paris: Hachette Littérature, collection Pluriel, 2006.

•             Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai. Entretiens avec Aimé Césaire. Paris: Albin Michel, 2005.

•             Catalog, Isaac Julien’s Exhibition “Phantom Creole”, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2005.

•             Amarres. Creolisations India-océanes, with Carpanin Marimoutou (2004° transl. in English Moorings (2009)).

With collaboration as a recurring approach to his practice, Kemang Wa Lehulere has worked across disciplines from Theatre, Radio, Television and the Fine Arts. He works in various mediums ranging from drawing and performance to writing. He is the co-founder of Gugulective (2006), the Center for Historical Reenactments and a member of the Dead Revolutionaries Club and non non collective.

With collaboration as a recurring approach to his practice, Kemang Wa Lehulere has worked across disciplines from Theatre, Radio, Television and the Fine Arts. He works in various mediums ranging from drawing and performance to writing. He is the co-founder of Gugulective (2006), the Center for Historical Reenactments and a member of the Dead Revolutionaries Club and non non collective.