Credits (photo opposite): Mosako Wa Nako, Lerato Shadi. Photo, dewil.ch (cc by-nc-nd), 2014
Between November 2019 and June 2020, the Cité internationale des arts proposes 12 get-togethers #DialoguesAfriques around the theme Performing Politics in Africa and in the Diasporas.
A 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 Ecole Universitaire de Recherche ArTeC and a government grant from the National Research Agency referenced as ANR-17-EURE-008), in the context of an ongoing seminar series titled Arts in Africa and the Diasporas: practices, forms of knowledge, mobilities.
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.
Because it takes on multiple shapes, live (or performative) art cannot be formatted. This and the intimate link that it entertains with a site, a history, a public makes it a powerful tool for thinking through and inflecting political states of affairs. This is so in particular in the African world, home, today, to radical experiments around the form, the meaning and the potential of performance.