Afrotopia

Public Intimacy proposes a broad array of manifestations and functions of intimacy as an artistic theme in South Africa. It places intimacies on the human body, on the built environment, and within visual culture as forms of circulation of meaning and values. In the exhibition, intimacy becomes both an instrument of resistance and a coping mechanism in and after an era of extensive political and social repression.

In 1965, at the age of 17, Touré left the newly founded republic of Mali, and travelled to the capital of its former colonizer, France, to work in the car industry, underpaid and with an unsustainable number of working hours. After purchasing a small Kodak Retinette, he started to document the precarious working and living conditions of migrant workers and their struggles. In 1975/76 he and several members of the independent Association Culturel des Travailleurs Africains (Cultural Association of African Workers) decided to engage in farming in the region of Haute-Marne. In 1977, Touré along with fourteen former activist migrant workers founded the agricultural cooperative Somankidi Coura on the shore of the Senegal River. They decided to propose an alternative way of thinking and subsistence agriculture (une agriculture vivrière/ouvrier) meant to provide alimentary self-sufficiency. Somankidi Coura has and is driven by a strong socialist ideal of self-sustainment, inter-dependence and connectedness. Today, the cooperative is run by around five hundred people representing an extraordinary example of agriculture as a site of resistance, including cooperatives that generate healthy rural self-organised communities. The local school building houses Touré’s photographic archive of Somankidi Coura’s development throughout the decades, to inspire other communities in building new planetary alternatives based on practices of soil care. Sowing Somankidi Coura: A Generative Archive is a long-term research endeavour by the French artist Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré and other co-founders of the cooperative around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura. JW

Digitized in 2018 by IFAN, the Fundamental Institute of Black Africa – Cheikh Anto Diop, AWA : la revue de la femme noire was an independent magazine produced in Dakar, Senegal, between 1964 and 1973 by a network of African women. Unique in its kind, AWA was the showcase for an emerging wave of thought and reflections produced mainly by African women in the wake of the African independences. With political essays, poems and topics related to fashion and well-being, the magazine, far from making any claims, offered to bear witness to an era when women could tell their stories and formulate their visions of the world. Its digitisation provides us with the opportunity to go back to a time far from our own but with many resonances to today, both in the relevance of the intellectual proposal and in the similarities with the subjects covered. 

Àsìkò is the result of an itinerant annual pedagogical programme for artists and curators initiated by the late curator Bisi Silva, promoting the movement of artistic and curatorial knowledge on the African continent. The first two programmes took place in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2010 and 2012 and from 2013 moved to Accra/Kumasi, Dakar, Maputo, ending in Addis Ababa in 2016. The book documents how its participants and faculty spent five weeks in each city, as well as their interventions into pedagogical models that are based on research-on-the-move and how these methods created interactive social spaces. Visiting, critically discussing and responding to postcolonial public monuments in each city as one of the ways of thinking through what it means to be ‘postcolonial’ is impressively articulated in the book by some of the Àsìkò participants.

Each chapter puts photographs from west African archives and collections associated with the independence generation into dialogue with stories shared, and knowledge produced, in interviews I did with west African photographers, their descendants, and other collectors and keepers of photographs in order to illustrate the multitude of ways that urban west Africans were using expanded access to the medium in this moment. I argue and try to show that photographers, their subjects, and their publics used photography to express new experiences, to reshape public and political discourse, and to facilitate new conversations, relays, and exchanges—with people living right next door to them and all over the world—both on the eve of independence and in the post- independence years.

The Made in Musina project was a proposal by the South African artists Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi and Rangoato Hlasane for the programme entitled Reasons to Live in a Small Town initiated by the Network for Visual Arts in South Africa. The goal of the project was to create links between the artists themselves and the local population of Musina. The project was also a means of facilitating social cohesion between the different groups living in the town.