The next session of Dialogues Afriques #6, scheduled for March 5th, has been postponed to March 4th.
The reason is the following: on March 5, faculties and laboratories throughout France will be on strike to demonstrate against the neoliberals reforms by which the government intends to transform the pension system, higher education and research, the civil service and unemployment insurance. The teachers' collective that is organizing the seminar will also be on strike as part of this movement.
Three years have gone by since I moved to France and in the course of these three years drastic changes have taken place in both my private and social lives. I have for example witnessed the pro-Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump, my wedding and the birth of my son. In addition, I have spent more time than I care to remember in the offices of the Prefecture du Val-de-Marne where they deliver visas and residency permits. I have seen Emmanuel Macron take office, the death of Prince and Bowie, the launch of Beyoncé’s album Lemonade, the emergence of the #metoo and the Gilets Jaunes movements, as well as countless other events which, in their various contexts, add up to a collective history, a history that permeates us all and in which we sometimes take an active part, often via our virtual avatars.
We have never been so close to history and yet so blind. Archive Fragile is an artistic project that encourages social experimentation. It offers the possibility of a voyage through time, one that fulfils our need to see into the future and to relativize the anxiety of the present.
For this performance, Euridice Zaituna Kala has established a working protocol in which a group of five people will discuss the idea for the project in advance. A second group of five will be invited by the first group, followed by a third, larger group that will be more distanced from the project. This will result in a sort of communication spiral, which will render the project and its references malleable. The aim is to create a platform, a place of commitment where images can play a role. These persistent images will comprise the traces of a memory constituted by contemporary narratives. They will function as a representative trace of a moment in time, of a story that will multiply based on new fictional or real narratives.
Seminar of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales presented by Christine Douxami, Sarah Fila-Bakabadio, Katja Gentric, Dominique Malaquais and Julie Peghini (with the support of the Ecole Universitaire de Recherche ARTEC and a government grant from the National Research Agency under the Investissements d’avenir programme ANR-17-EURE-0008) in the context of a seminar series titled Arts in Africa and the Diasporas: practices, knowledge, mobility.
In parallel, the international conference Africa(s): Urban utopias, performative utopias will be held from June 4 to 7, 2020 at the Cité internationale des arts and at the Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine.