The performative gesture is multi-faceted and escapes any framework. From this freedom and the intimate link it maintains with a place, a history and an audience, a practice is born that knows how to think about and influence the political. This is particularly the case in Africa, where radical experimentation with the forms, meanings and possibilities of performance is taking place.
The seminar, in the continuity of the previous editions, will take as a starting point the work of researchers and artists around the questions linking performative art and politics. Proposed by Christine Douxami, Sarah Fila-Bakabadio and Julie Peghini, it will invite artists and researchers for each session, considering Art in its engaged dimension and its possible duplications within the societies concerned. The question of the relationship between European and American diasporas and their links with the African continent will be examined through the study of performances from these different worlds.
"The Confounding Performances of Blackness in Contemporary Histories of Urbanization"
At a global level, blackness continues to operate as a mode of managing the intensified urbanization of populations increasingly circulating across territories and provisionally anchoring that circulation in various length residencies in towns and cities. From Eastern Indonesia to Northeast India, to the Mediterranean, to Brazil and Peru, blackness is mobilized to filter, interdict, read, and channel circulation, as well as to pre-figure more experimental solidarities.
The presentation explores such solidarities, which essentially erase the normative implications of being black - for example, as not registering any essential difference while also generating a positivity through extensions beyond the recognized integrity of subject - solidarities that spread around the world in a cyclical movement of disappearance and reappearance.
AbdouMaliq Simone is a Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, co-director of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab, Polytechnic University of Turin, and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies, the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town.
Thursday, April 06, 2023, at 5pm
Auditorium - Cité internationale des arts (the session will also be broadcast live via zoom)
Session in English
"Temporal Order between Uchronia and Microhistory."
In Hanna Kokolo's practice, each installation is a treatment of microhistory via uchronia. The constraint is the following: they all have a link. For this conference-performance, the artist-performer proposes to go through different interpretations of history under two chronological prisms: the true creation dates of the works, superimposed on the temporalities in which they are historically inscribed. It is a rewriting of History, told by the descendants of the defeated and no longer by the victors.
This archiving of the Afropean diaspora will be deployed in all its generosity by a performed narration for which Hanna Kokolo will embrace the role of storyteller, alternating between physical and acousmatic presence. It will be a question of sharing together the resurrection of certain inanimate parts of our common narrative. In addition to the visual representations of the works presented, a few excerpts of sound pieces or videos will be broadcast, as restitution of the performance.
Temporal Order between Uchronia and Microhistory is a new ubiquity, an invitation to fantasize a transcontinental and transtemporal journey.
“Through the auto-fictions I create, I address the question of intergenerational memory, which would bind all my characters without their notice. Gradually, I came to position myself between these three different fields: Afrofeminism, Afrofuturism and Decoloniality." - Hanna Kokolo, artist-performer.
Thursday, April 20, 2023, at 5pm
Auditorium - Cité internationale des arts
"When the image becomes spoken"
Through films and installations, Caroline Déodat explores the spectral dimensions of the moving image in a circulation between fiction and experimental ethnography. From her obsessions with the processes of archiving and alienation, history and the myths of violence, she seeks ways to recompose histories and weave silenced genealogies through the convocation of haunting memories, deferred archives and oral images.
Caroline Déodat is an artist and researcher. She has a doctorate in anthropology from the EHESS and was trained at the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in the Art post-graduate program. Her work has been shown at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, at the Résonances de la Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon, at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin, and soon at the Beursschouwburg in Brussels and at the 67th Salon de Montrouge.
Caroline Déodat was recently in residence through the "Fondation Daniel and Nina Carasso x Cité internationale des arts" programme.
Thursday, May 04, 2023, at 5pm
Auditorium - Cité internationale des arts
"Healing from one self"
From the festival Les Récréatrâles in Burkina Faso to the École des Sables in Senegal, via the music of the Ovahimba of Namibia, the Gnawas of Morocco, and the Maloya of Reunion Island, Josué Mushiga shares his theory on theatre transposed to Burundians. Starting from the need to find in the body a liberation of the word in order to renew its communion with the public gaze, Josué Mushiga's postulate starts from the struggle to find his own means of creation in political conditions that are often not favourable for cultural and artistic development.
Josué Mugisha is an actor, dancer-choreographer, director and playwright. He is in residence at the Cité internationale des arts through the TRAME programme.
Thursday, May 11, 2023, at 5pm
Auditorium - Cité internationale des arts
Hybrid session, also accessible via Zoom.
"Towards Global Black Cultural Studies in Theory & Practice: Reading Tejumola Olaniyan"
Over a thirty-year career, scholar Tejumola Olaniyan wrote eight books and over fifty articles that covered an extraordinary range of topics and genres: from the pop music of Nigerian Fela Kuti and his rebel art and politics to the plays of African American writers Ntozake Shange and Amiri Baraka; from the urban garrison architecture of Lagos and Accra to Caribbean liminal spaces evidenced in Derek Walcott’s writing; from the theories of Blackness to more recent trends of Afrocentrism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism. Olaniyan took both African political cartoons and American popular films like Coming to America seriously—that is, as expressions fully warranting academic analysis and critical self-reflexivity. This presentation argues that implicit in Olaniyan’s intellectual legacy is an evolving theory and method of Global Black Cultural Studies. Through a systematic appraisal of his oeuvre, CAtherine M. Cole seeks to identify key principles of Global Black Cultural Studies as Olaniyan forged it, setting the stage for an appraisal of how his scholarship may guide an ever-evolving field of transdisciplinary teaching and research on Black cultures worldwide.
Catherine M. Cole is Professor of Dance and English at the University of Washington, where she recently served as Divisional Dean of the Arts. Her most recent book Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice (2020) is on dance and live art in contemporary South Africa and beyond. Previous books include Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (2010), Africa After Gender? (2007), and Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (2001).
Thursday, May 11, 2023, at 5.45pm
Auditorium - Cité internationale des arts
Hybrid session, also accessible via Zoom.
"Infinite Rehearsal"
The fourth session of the seminar "The arts in Africa and its diasporas: practices, knowledge, mobilities" is based on the notion of Infinite Rehearsal as theorised by the Guyanese author Wilson Harris in his eponymous book. Harris describes an infinite rehearsal, which does not reproduce the identical, but rather declines the plural futures and pasts contained in a single moment, an image, a memory. The poetic force of these infinite versions haunts the performance in the present and inspires a dialogue that seems to have begun long ago.
Amina Belghiti is a writer and independent researcher interested in the collective pedagogical experiments that shaped artistic ecosystems in north and west Africa in the 1960s-1990s, and publishing as artistic and curatorial practice. She holds degrees from Williams and Harvard, and dropped a degree from EHESS.
M'barek Bouhchichi is an artist graduated from the Centre Pédagogique Régional, Rabat, Morocco. His works have been exhibited at in biennials and international institutions in Africa and Europe, including the 13th edition of the Biennial of Contemporary African Art, Dakar, Senegal.
"Marabout 4.zero"
Of Peul origin, as is the term "gris-gris", and having attended Koranic school and several traditional rites, Lamyne M is familiar with magico-religious syncretism and these objects, which draw their origin and social effectiveness from the universal will of human beings to influence their destiny. Monotheistic religions prohibit and punish the makers and users of "gris-gris", "amulets", "talismans", "fetishes", what Islam calls Chirq (occult practice, witchcraft). However, this does not prevent the persistence and omnipresence of their use by Muslims, Christians and Jews, in very contemporary contexts and for very contemporary reasons: matrimonial disputes, soccer matches, school exams, political elections, migratory journeys…
Lamyne M started out as a stylist, but is now a visual artist and performer. He is inspired by the principle of customization, which he transforms into colorful objects. Through the creation of giant dresses in noble materials, contemporary embroidery or brightly-colored animal costumes, he makes the "invisible" of our society shine. By denouncing male domination, questioning borders, warning of modern slavery and freeing the animal world from human control, Lamyne M passionately explores contemporary environmental and migration issues.
"Corpus mordus: between performance and the Mediterranean"
Romina de Novellis (performance artist and visual artist) is interested in the question of the performativity of bodies in context, in a specific given space, which can be both geographical and cultural. De Novellis works in particular on the rewriting of the body in a cultural context, through the construction of counter-rituals. Her approach enables her to rethink the Mediterranean space in a decolonial and intersectional way.
Romina de Novellis, performance and visual artist, is a researcher in anthropology at the EHESS in Paris. She is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dance of London. Her work has focused on contemporary art, with research in both art and anthropology centered on the body and the Mediterranean. Her work focuses on endurance, repetition and non-standard behavior. Romina de Novellis works with and on Mediterranean communities, creating long-term performances in urban and private spaces.