Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere

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.

What affective economies are triggered by social artistic practices? What structures of support do they give rise to? What politics of care govern any aesthetic and political form of organisation or institutionality? Written in the heat of the debate around the so-called ‘new institutionalisms’, this collection of interviews and exchanges with artists, curators, political activists and neighbourhood associations tackles the role and place of affect and care — of a body, of a community, of a memory — in their work.

Traditionally the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat was a place where artisanal craftwork for the Marché en Fer (Iron Market) in Port-au-Prince was produced. Today the neighborhood mainly produces craftwork for wider Caribbean tourist economies in Panama, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, or Puerto Rico. Many families began to settle between these workshops and small warehouses, renting small houses made out of corrugated metal. In the last sixteen years, the inhabitants of this neighborhood re-invented the area as a destination for adventurous art tourists and adapted to its new visitors with an affinity for contemporary art. This development occurred parallel to the interest of Haitian and traveling curators in the assemblages and sculptures of the group Atis Rezistans.

The book brings forward the practice and concept of Care by situating it in an organism as such soil. Beside a human-centric approach the author is defining Care through its agencies, materialities and practicalities in its processing in the more-than-human worlds. Care not in an exploitative form but through a feminist politics within multi-temporality ethics is at the centre of the book. The author aims to include a temporal dimension of care that evolves like ‘living soil’. This book is very valuable for socially engaged art practices that situate themselves in a more-than-human world and cultivation-related care practices.

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