AWA : la revue de la femme noire

Museum of Contemporary African Art is the catalogue of the eponymous exhibition that was presented at Tate Modern in 2013 by artist Meschac Gaba. We could also have started this note by saying that it was an artwork in itself, since the artist deployed a museum infrastructure at the very heart of Tate’s museum display. In fact, not being able to project himself within these walls, he made sure that the space adapted to his needs rather than settling for denying his own reality. This echoes the feeling of evolving inside a culture that is not one’s own, while still wishing to find one’s place within it. It also echoes the fact that art history, in many respects, makes invisible the bodies that could be described as ‘unsanctioned’. Museums as places of display often echo this negation. However, and since Meschac Gaba has shone in one of the places of conceptual legitimation which defines what we commonly call ‘contemporary art’, the door is today truly open to us. 

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.

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.

In Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, Federici discusses the practice and concept of commons within diverse geographical contexts such as Africa and Latin America in order to highlight women’s movements. It brings to the fore the effort of women’s solidarity movements from various cases that debate and struggle for the commons. The book also includes discussions on reproductive work, affective labour and the transformation of everyday life that influences the way of commoning and understanding the term commons better. This book is a collection of cases of feminist struggles and other essays in which Federici discusses feminist approaches and their contribution to the commons. The book may greatly contribute to the debate and practice of socially engaged art practices that are operating in female spaces. PT

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