Bivouac #2 / Breathing Out of School, RAW Académie

, Anna Tjé con­tinues to explore healing music through a per­for­mance where Safous/Bitotos (fruits widely cul­ti­vated in Cameroon) claim their nar­ra­tive, their prop­a­ga­tion, their own repa­ra­tion.
Inspired by her research on so-called "exotic" fruits and on R&B Slow Jams, the artist tells the story of a char­acter named Ngomboa by offering a vocal and poetic impro­vi­sa­tion involving matri­lineal sto­ries and magic realism.
By eating these unmuz­zled fruit-bodies, Anna Tjé uses her voice as sound mate­rial to exper­i­ment with notions of Queer Temporalities (E. Freeman) and the Power of the Erotic (A. Lorde), while exploring themes of migra­tion, coming of age and twin­ning.

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RAW Material Company is a center for art, knowl­edge and society. It is an ini­tia­tive involved with cura­to­rial prac­tice, artistic edu­ca­tion, res­i­den­cies, knowl­edge pro­duc­tion, and archiving of theory and crit­i­cism on art. It works to foster appre­ci­a­tion and growth of artistic and intel­lec­tual cre­ativity in Africa. The pro­gram is trans-dis­ci­plinary and is equally informed by lit­er­a­ture, film, archi­tec­ture, pol­i­tics, fashion, cuisine and dias­pora.

http://www.raw­ma­te­ri­al­com­pany.org/

Dulcie Abrahams Atlass
Dulcie Abrahams Altass is a curator and art his­to­rian. She was born in London and lives and works in Dakar, Senegal. She is a pro­gram curator at RAW Material Company in Dakar where she co-curated the exhi­bi­tions La révo­lu­tion viendra sous une forme non-encore imag­in­able (2018), Toutes les fautes qu’il y avait dans le monde, je les ai ramassées (2018) and PO4 (Blackout) (2019). Some recent pro­jects at RAW Material Company include Kan jaa ta: Basculer de l’ombre à la lumière (Bamako’s meet­ings, 2019) and États des lieux 4: Sortir du rang; Collectifs artis­tiques et par­al­lélisme translocal (Dhaka Art Summit, 2020). Her work in Senegal also includes research on themes as var­ious as country’s per­for­mance art and the inter­ac­tion between hip hop and con­tem­po­rary art. She is the author of sev­eral texts about Senegalese artists and was a member of the artists’ col­lec­tive Les Petites Pierres.

Éric Baudelaire
Éric Baudelaire (1973) is an artist and film­maker based in Paris. After studying polit­ical science, he devel­oped an artistic prac­tice focused on research work including pho­tog­raphy, print­making and video. Since 2010, cinema has become cen­tral to his work. His fea­ture films Also Known as Jihadi (2017), Lettres à Max (2014), The Ugly One (2013) and L’Anabase de May et Fusako Shigenobu, MasaoAdachi, et 27 années sans images (2011) were pro­grammed at fes­ti­vals in Locarno, Toronto, New York, at FID Marseille and in Rotterdam. During the exhi­bi­tions, Éric Baudelaire incor­po­rates his films into instal­la­tions that include other works, per­for­mances, pub­li­ca­tions and public pro­gram­ming, such as APRÈS pro­ject at the Centre Pompidou (2017) and The Secession Sessions which started at Bétonsalon in Paris, then at the Bergen Kunsthall and the Sharjah Biennial 12. His most recent per­sonal exhi­bi­tions took place at the Witte de With in Rotterdam, the Fridericianum in Kassel, the Beirut Art Center in Gasworks – London - and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. His work appears in the col­lec­tions of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, at the MACBA in Barcelona, at the MoMA in New York, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the M+ in Hong Kong.

Patricia Falguières
Patricia Falguières is Professor at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. She has pub­lished numerous essays on Renaissance phi­los­ophy and art, clas­si­fi­ca­tions, indexes and the birth of the museum in modern Europe. She is also active in the field of con­tem­po­rary art through mono­graphic studies (Abraham Cruzvillegas, Julie Ault, Danh Vo, Fiona Tan, Mona Hatoum, Gabriel Orozco, Haegue Yang, Lamia Joreige…), arti­cles and essays (about con­cep­tual art and the rela­tion­ship between art and the­ater in the 20th cen­tury…). She han­dled the crit­ical edi­tion of the Brian O’Doherty classic, Inside the White Cube (2008). Patricia Falguières leads var­ious pro­grams in his­tory and research in art theory. She ini­ti­ated the serie Lectures Maison Rouge at La Maison Rouge (Paris) and co-leads Something you Should Know sem­i­nars at EHESS with Élisabeth Lebovici and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez. In 2011, the Centre Pompidou orga­nized a lec­tures and meet­ings pro­gram on the per­spec­tives of art his­tory and crit­i­cism named according to Patricia Falguières. She lives and works in Paris.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige
The Lebanese film­makers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige inter­weave the­matic, con­cep­tual and formal links through pho­tographs, video instal­la­tions, fic­tional films and doc­u­men­taries. Self-taught, they became film­makers and artists through neces­sity in the wake of the Lebanese civil wars and con­sider them­selves as researchers. Their very per­sonal oeuvre, based on their var­ious encoun­ters, has led them to explore the realm of the vis­ible and of absence, leading to a back-and-forth between life and fic­tion. For more than fif­teen years, their films and art­works, cre­ated using per­sonal and polit­ical doc­u­ments, develop nar­ra­tives out of sto­ries kept secret in the face of the pre­vailing his­tory such as the missing people from the Lebanese civil war, a for­gotten space pro­ject, geo­log­ical and archae­o­log­ical cores, or the strange con­se­quences of Internet scams and spams.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s work is con­structed around the pro­duc­tion of types of knowl­edge, the rewriting of his­tory and con­struc­tion of imag­i­naries. They draw on their expe­ri­ence of their own country while going beyond its fron­tiers.
Their films have been shown and multi awarded in major inter­na­tional fes­ti­vals and their art­works exhib­ited in museums and art cen­ters around the world, most recently the Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume and Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; the Victoria & Albert Museum, British Museum and Whitechapel Gallery in London; Haus der Kunst in Munich, IVAM in Spain, the Guggenheim in New York; SF Moma; MIT Boston, the Sharjah Art Foundation and Home Works Forum Beirut, as well as many bien­nales including Istanbul, Lyon, Sharjah, Kochi, Gwangju, Yinchuan, and Venice. They have also received many inter­na­tional awards as the Abraaj prize and the Marcel Duchamp award in 2017.

Sandrine Honliasso
Sandrine Honliasso is an inde­pen­dent curator and critic. She worked as a pro­duc­tion and medi­a­tion assis­tant at the Fondation Kadist (Paris) and as head of com­mu­ni­ca­tion at the Institut d’art con­tem­po­rain/Villeurbanne. She is the author of “Mono­logues”, a dig­ital space ded­i­cated to cur­rent artist cre­ation. She was co-curator of the exhi­bi­tions Partout, mais pas pour très longtemps (2018, Lyon); Germination (2018, Dakar); Tongue on tongue, nos salives dans ton oreille (2019, Paris) and curator of the exhi­bi­tion Baptiste Fertillet, Cutting/Slasher (2020, Nantes). She was twice a res­i­dent of the RAW Académie research pro­gram (Germination, 2018; CURA 2019) at the RAW Material Company art centre (Dakar). She is cur­rently col­lab­o­rating with Ariane Leblanc on the exhi­bi­tion D’ailleurs je viens d’ici that will be pre­sented in Spring 2021 at the Comédie de Caen.

Ariane Leblanc
Ariane Leblanc was born in 1993 in Paris. She lives and works in Paris.
She studied cul­tural medi­a­tion at The University of Paris I, where she focused more par­tic­u­larly on mul­ti­cul­tur­alism in the post-colo­nial era through research work con­ducted col­lec­tively. In addi­tion to her con­crete impli­ca­tion in alter­na­tive envi­ron­ments through the artistic direc­tor­ship of the Rue des Miracles group, she also devel­oped a deep interest in the role of public spaces in con­tem­po­rary urban pro­duc­tion. Since 2015, she works at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, first as an intern and, in 2016, as coor­di­nator of La Semeuse pro­ject that con­nects envi­ron­mental and ter­ri­to­rial issues through an artistic per­spec­tive. She col­lab­o­rates on the research of the artist Uriel Orlow, whose prac­tice priv­i­leges pro­cesses of pluridis­ci­plinarity. In November 2018, she par­tic­i­pated at the RAW Material Company Académie pro­gram, directed by artist and per­former Otobong Nkanga. In 2019, she real­ized the exhi­bi­tion Pour un inter­stice paysager with the artist Pierre Simon at the Comédie de Caen.

Naomi Lulendo
Naomi Lulendo was born in 1994, in Paris. In her multi-dis­ci­plinary prac­tice between painting, sculp­ture, per­for­mance, pho­tog­raphy and instal­la­tion, Naomi Lulendo cre­ates plastic pro­posals that con­found and rein­vent our rela­tion­ship to the spaces - including the body as an inti­mate space - that we inhabit. Using the con­cept of "play" as a tool for shaping and cre­ating hybrid objects, images and texts, Naomi Lulendo observes in her approach per­sonal and col­lec­tive, social and polit­ical impli­ca­tions of human mobility and the meeting of cul­tures. By exploring the pro­cess of iden­tity con­struc­tion, making some­times an analogy between body, lan­guage and archi­tec­ture, her work draw as much from her per­sonal biog­raphy as from an atten­tion to the pol­y­semy of bodies, forms, motifs and objects as well as their sym­bolic poten­tiality. Through lan­guage games and gym­nas­tics of ref­er­ences, Naomi Lulendo probes the notion of "pat­tern" and its rela­tion­ship with body and space. Creating a par­allel between the body-sur­face and geo­graph­ical space, the "alter­na­tive" appears in the artist’s work as a way of being and " being expe­ri­enced " and is man­i­fested in her explo­ration of how the mobility of indi­vid­uals - vol­un­tary or forced, his­tor­ical and modern - shapes our imag­i­na­tions. Naomi Lulendo is grad­uate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 2018, she par­tic­i­pated in the RAW Académie research sem­inar under the direc­tion of the artist Otobong Nkanga in Dakar. Her work has been shown at the Galerie Allen, Paris (2019); the 13th edi­tion of the Biennale d’art con­tem­po­rain, Dakar (2018) and the Galleria Continua, Boissy le Châtel (2016).

Dominique Malaquais
Dominique Malaquais con­ducts research at the CNRS (African Worlds Institute, Paris) and she co-directs - with Kadiatou Diallo – the exper­i­mental and cura­to­rial plat­form SPARCK (Space for Pan-African Research, Creation and Knowledge). She is inter­ested in the inter­sec­tions between polit­ical vio­lence, eco­nomic inequal­i­ties and the elab­o­ra­tion of urban cul­tures in the cap­i­talocene era. Among her recent and ongoing pro­jects, she pub­lished in Critiques, Multitudes and African Arts, has devel­oped with Julie Peghini - an anthro­pol­o­gist and film­maker - Yif Menga, a multi-posi­tion research pro­gram around per­for­mance as a polit­ical pro­ject (col­lab­o­ra­tion with Récréâtrales fes­tival in Ouagadougou), Ce dont nous sommes faits, a medium-length film by Julie, Dominique and Elise Villatte, Dialogues Afriques, a sem­inar con­ducted with Sarah Fila-Bakabadio and Christine Douxami (EHESS/Cité inter­na­tional des arts), Afriques: Utopies urbaines, prophé­tiques, per­for­ma­tives - with Julie and deeply inspired by the work of the writer and poet Sony Labou Tansi – a series of meet­ings-per­for­mances at the Cité de l’archi­tec­ture et du pat­ri­moine, the Haute école des arts du Rhin and the Cité inter­na­tional des arts; she was co-curator of Kinshasa Chroniques exhi­bi­tion at the Cité de l’archi­tec­ture (14th October 2020 – 11th January 2021) in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Erica Androa Mindre Kolo, Mega Mingiedi, Fiona Meadows, Sébastien Godret, Claude Allemand, Jean-Christophe Lanquetin. Dominique Malaquais is a member of the edi­to­rial board of sev­eral jour­nals, as Chimurenga and Savvy, for example. She is Past President of ACASA (Arts Council of the African Studies Association).

Rasha Salti
Rasha Salti is a researcher, writer and an art and film exhi­bi­tion curator. She lives and works between Berlin and Beirut.

Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy
Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy was born and raised in Dakar. She moved to Paris in 2006 to study plastic arts at the University Paris 1 (Panthéon Sorbonne). After obtaining her degree, she con­tinued her studies in Arts and Culture and took part in cul­tural medi­a­tion activ­i­ties at the Musée du Louvre, the Musée Rodin and the Grand Palais. With these expe­ri­ences, she joined the Semiose gallery and then the Magnin-A gallery, in which she became increas­ingly inter­ested in con­tem­po­rary African cre­ation and its mul­tiple his­toric­i­ties. This encour­aged her to pursue a Master’s degree in Science and Technology of Exhibition at Paris 1. This will ini­tiate the orga­ni­za­tion of con­fer­ences such as: IN/ EXcludere: La représen­ta­tion et ses enjeux, a meeting around the work of Mohamed Bourouissa, at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Dans la tête de... Anne Brégeaut at La Maison rouge - Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris. She was co-curator of the exhi­bi­tion Plus un geste at the Galerie Michel Journiac, Paris. In May 2014, she par­tic­i­pated as a cura­to­rial assis­tant in the 11th edi­tion of Dak’Art, where she worked with Mr. Massamba Mbaye on the exhi­bi­tion: Cultural Diversity at the Musée Théodore Monod d’Art Africain, Dakar. She joined the teams of Marianne International, for which she worked for the Fondation Louis Vuitton for three years. She returned to Dakar in May 2018 and worked at the Musée des Civilisations Noires as a cura­to­rial assis­tant on the inau­gural exhi­bi­tion: Civilisations africaines: créa­tion con­tinue de l’humanité and then became head of the Mediation and Cultural Animation Department. She recently pro­duced a series of inter­views for the magazine Something We Africans Got #10 and the SWAG high pro­file magazines #2 and #3. She is now pro­gram com­mis­sioner for #RAW­Family.

Anna Tjé
Born in 1989, Anna Tjé lives and works in Paris. Through a tran­s­dis­­­ci­­plinary prac­tice at the inter­sec­­tion of video, per­­for­­mance, instal­la­­tion and sculp­­ture, Anna Tjé aims to decon­struct the mech­a­nisms of sur­­vival and healing in so-called sub­­cul­­tures.
Navigating through research and con­tem­po­rary cre­a­tion, she uses the moving image, the poetic nar­ra­­tive, sound and music, ges­­ture as well as archival con­ver­sa­­tions, tex­tiles and veg­­eta­bles and fruit mate­rial to explore notions of inti­­macy, trauma and the resilience of the body and expe­ri­ences of black women*. Anna Tjé thus cre­ates immer­­sive spaces that inter­ro­­gate the social con­struc­­tions of space and of past-pre­sent-future time in rela­­tion to diverse forms of queer eroti­­cism and familial sto­ries and ties. By drawing on her per­­sonal archives and on the jour­neys of mil­i­­tant fem­i­nist and/or queer artists from the African dias­­pora, she uses memory, utopia, science fic­­tion and spir­i­­tu­ality as vehi­­cles of eman­­ci­­pa­­tion and com­­mu­ni­­ca­­tion.
Anna Tjé studied tex­tile cre­a­tion and fashion design at Mod’art International in Paris before exploring other medias. After grad­u­ating with a Master’s in Communication and Publishing, she fur­ther devel­oped her research and prac­tice in the doc­­toral pro­­gram in arts and media in the depart­­ment of per­­for­­mance and the­atre at the New Sorbonne University in Paris. Co-founder and artistic director of Atayé, a lit­erary and artistic journal and plat­­form, Anna Tjé also orga­nizes artistic gath­­er­ings and con­ducts early learning and cre­a­tive writing work­shops. She has been selected as a PhD. can­di­date to the PhD. in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna, Austria (starting in October 2020).

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Friday, September 25th (dura­tion: 1:29:07)

Penelope, Noor Abed
6min30, silent, 16mm film (Palestine, 2014)
Inspired by the Odyssey, based on Homer’s epic poem from Greek Mythology, this work is based on the con­cept of myth; its posi­tion in his­tory and rela­tion to the pre­sent and the imag­i­nary. The con­tin­uous pres­ence of the female figure, as a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Penelope, unfolds the absence of the hero figure. Through the act of sewing, she is returning to a past memory simul­ta­ne­ously. The past is acti­vated in the imag­i­na­tion, rein­forcing through move­ment its dis­lo­ca­tion from its orig­inal site. The work attempts to reflect a reality other than the one his­tory offers. Here, myth could be seen as a col­lec­tive dream and public imag­i­na­tion.

DELIVERY, Freya Edmondes
12min30, cre­ated in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Daniel Blumberg, as part of Home cooking’s live stream series.
This work illus­trates the con­fla­tion of raw expe­ri­ence and ten­dency to pro­ject vir­tu­ally con­tracted gaming and mar­keting strate­gies onto inter­pre­ta­tion of public inter­flow. The uncon­scious infil­tra­tion of task ori­ented thought pat­terns can be seen in the video, echoes of the game re-occur, affecting, even sup­ple­menting, the per­for­mance of the task at hand. Delivery ser­vice.
The task achievers are lost in the loop pur­pose ‘Delivery!’, a self made theme tune, also implying the enjoy­able con­ver­sion of labor into game. They smile, and are not phased by the silent scream of the huge car­cass strapped to their vehicle, this visu­ally dis­cor­dant con­coc­tion sym­bolic of the tyrannic inequity of util­i­tarian global com­merce. The core horror is not a threat, is irrel­e­vant to the pri­ori­tised task at hand. Practical apathy is employed. Reflective respon­si­bility relin­quishes itself. Ideology acts like bac­teria within the layers of sub­jec­tivity. The screaming fish is the ele­phant in the room, strapped to the unstop­pable motor of depoliti­cised goal ori­ented mech­a­nism.

Hom̐e, Naomi Lulendo
5min55
Through the motif of the sea (la mer) and its lan­guage, a silent nar­ra­tion takes place on mourning and memory. The mother (la mère) is gone, only the sea remains. And the bitter (l’amer) sen­sa­tion that the return will not happen any­more. Yet the waves and their undertow rock, as if to carry this con­tem­pla­tive med­i­ta­tion which emerges from the empti­ness after the loss. Hom̐e ini­ti­ates the begin­ning of the ges­ta­tion of a body and his return to the mother island, which tries to reveal its sorrow at a time when the noise of the world is too heavy.

Highjacking Hindsight, Ash Moniz
15min30, 2020
A paper com­pany that pro­duces fake snow also sup­plies the insur­ance doc­u­ments that drove a man to set his own ship on fire. Rummaging between essay-fic­tion and per­for­mance, Hijacking Hindsight (2020) is a film that sets into motion a chain of rela­tions between the legal/tem­poral appa­ra­tuses that sculpt logis­tical geogra­phies. Demagnetized from site-speci­ficity, this work stages how a trade route can define its locality by the route that it is not. Documents of risk, on board a cargo-ship passing through the Red Sea, encounter a per­for­ma­tive event taking place in the middle of a vast frozen body of water. Through an abstract inter­weaving of instru­ments and instances, it entan­gles how his­tor­ical con­cep­tu­al­iza­tions of lost-time shaped risk aver­sion’s role within envi­ron­mental loss.

El Retorno, Hira Nabi
12min3, made during the ’Filming in Cuba with Abbas Kiarostami’ work­shop in Jan-Feb 2016
A taxi driver agrees to drive a stranger around a town the man has never vis­ited. Their short journey gives the man a new des­ti­na­tion.

..._ _ _..., Stefano Pelosato
8min51
Interdependence between living beings (Archaea, Bacteria, Eukarya); eco­ero­tism and bio­cen­trism; an inter­rupted radio com­mu­ni­ca­tion in a space of impris­on­ment.

Intimacy that daunted a silent pornog­raphy, Esther Poppe
13min56
The time that frames this expe­ri­ence, our ability to keep focus, gov­ern­ments, keeping every­body con­fused, being sta­tionary and sequestered. We are living in mul­tiple win­dows, in bits and pieces, in frag­mented exhaus­tion, with atten­tion spans shorter than ever dwelling in online viewing rooms. Celebrating hetero­topi­anism and polyphony at the same time con­science fragility, civic values and trea­sure houses. It’s an inti­macy that is daunted a silent pornog­raphy.
Visual rum­bling at the speed waiting for the second to come. Let it run in the idle speed of what com­mit­ment was. Neck. Feet. Knees. And in the corner of the eye, mazy clip­ping licking the void.
On Soundplanes the fabric tears, trou­bled, encoun­ter­less. The wave of images breaks and leaves behind nothing but screen black. The artistic idea, which touches its own self without any aim, is dom­i­nated by the polit­ical. What hap­pened took me by sur­prise. Immunity and vul­ner­a­bility, resis­tance and danger of random opacity became more than ambiguous for there´s no sequence and no order. What live moments are allowed: in nature, on the street, in the bed­room, in front of the screen?

NON AU FRANC CFA, Narcis Diaz Pujol
7min24
This video shows Guy Marius Sagna, an anti-colo­nial activist from Dakar, speaking about the West African Franc (FCFA). In par­allel, we see extracts of videos from the internet per­taining to the burning of a 5000 FCFA note by Kémi Séba in 2017, an act which led to his arrest and con­se­quent expul­sion from Senegal.
This piece is part of a series of videos called La Place de l’Europe col­lected from the site laplacedeleu­rope.eu, which takes its name from a public square on Gorée Island, a former site of the slave trade which today - according to UNESCO - is a sanc­tuary of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion (in June 2020, the square was renamed Place de la Liberté et de la Dignité humaine thanks to social pres­sure). On this web­site, it is pos­sible to view and listen to mem­bers of asso­ci­a­tions for repa­tri­ates and migrants, social workers, activists and spir­i­tual guides from the Dakar region speaking from dif­ferent per­spec­tives on the rela­tion­ships between the European Union - notably Spain - and West African coun­tries, notably Senegal.

The Ghost of the University, Frida Robles
6min, Performer: Momo Fall, Editor: Ujjwal Utkarsh
The first time I went to Dakar was to attend the first ses­sion of the RAW Académie in 2016. Luckily enough I arrived at a house located inside the campus of the Cheikh Anta Diop University, the UCAD. I remember how much I was in awe at the beauty of that place. My morning walks from the uni­ver­sity to RAW became a sort of mag­ical time, and the uni­ver­sity turned into a quasi obses­sion which I tried to shift into an artistic pur­suit. This video is one of those failed attempts to cap­ture just frag­ments of the poetic char­acter of the UCAD campus.

Saturday, September 26th

The Angel, Azrael, Mustafa Boga
37min25, A col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­ject written and pro­duced by Mustafa Boğa with con­tri­bu­tions from 35 artists
The Angel, Azrael is a film pro­ject made from the con­tri­bu­tions of 35 women who inter­preted poems written by Mustafa Boga. Based on the poems, the cre­ators were asked to make films of around a minute long by using any type of film medium they pre­ferred, including per­for­mances, short films, ani­ma­tion and music videos. The poems depict the moment when Azrael is on earth to take the life of those who are dying.
Through the films, we travel all around the world from a city time-lapse in Tehran to a little boat on the River Nile. We meet people from Italy, the UK, the USA and Turkey and we hear French, Spanish, German, Icelandic, Arabic, Greek and Danish. They dance, per­form, cry, swim and ani­mate. Songs were made from the poems, con­ver­sa­tions were cre­ated, and through this col­lected expe­ri­ence we enter a world where death is a tan­gent to life.

Uku Hlamba, Mbali Dhlamini
4min32
This per­for­mance is part of a series of events that have passed and are yet to occur;
“The spirit, breath or air….
Umoya is the ritual force of the body…
this spirit…
also gives strength…
to take air…
the umoya…
To take strength..”*
*Absolom Vilakazi, Zulu trans­for­ma­tions: A study of the dynamics of social change, 1962.

Borrowed Scenery, Shirin Sabahi
15min
Borrowed Scenery (借景 shakkei) is the East Asian prin­ciple of inte­grating the sur­rounding land­scape into the com­po­si­tion of a garden. Since 1970s artist Noriyuki Haraguchi (b. 1946—2020) has made a series of in-situ sculp­tures that aim at acquiring meaning through their thoughtful place­ment in their sur­round­ings. In 1977 Haraguchi was invited to per­ma­nently install an iter­a­tion of his sculp­ture Matter and Mind (Oil Pool) at the atrium of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Matter and Mind is a rect­an­gular steel basin filled with highly reflec­tive used engine oil. Regardless of the artist’s inten­tions and those of the host museum, the vis­i­tors have over the years turned this sculp­ture into a con­tainer for smaller objects by throwing coins and other objects into it.
The film is an artist por­trait of Noriyuki Haraguchi, who is aurally pre­sent throughout the film yet rarely seen. It fol­lows the gen­esis of Haraguchi’s oil pool sculp­tures, his use of ephemeral and indus­trial mate­rials, the inter­ac­tions with his oil pools in Tehran and else­where and the prox­im­i­ties of art to reli­gion and other belief sys­tems.

Rally, Felipe Steinberg
12min30
Rally is a work in pro­gress on the rela­tion­ship between dif­ferent types of colo­nial and post-colo­nial infras­truc­tures, such as public broad­casting, urban plan­ning, and cer­tain events; from the Paris Dakar race to recent protests in Dakar. The work explores the nature of the ‘now’ time: the rela­tion or non-rela­tion in between the pure evental exte­ri­ority and the field of images.

I’ll sing for you when you leave / hymns, Anna Tjé
3min
In August 2014, I went to Cameroon to bury a member of my family in my mother’s native vil­lage.
I decided to doc­u­ment this mourning, from Ngobilo to Bimbia, where the remains of an old slave port reside (a deter­mining site in the Cameroonian his­tory of the slave trade).
By filming my wan­der­ings in the forest - where my ances­tors are buried - the water­falls and the beaches bor­dering the Atlantic, as well as the choir of the vil­lage singing ’Ligwe Li Yesu / Malo ma Bakeke’ (trans­lated from the Bassa lan­guage by ’The Birth of Jesus / The arrival of the Three Kings’), I noted the funeral rites and won­dered about my posi­tion and my expe­ri­ences during this period of mourning.
By finding these images again and editing them during con­fine­ment, alone in the midst of a social and health crisis, I began to put words and thoughts to these land­scapes.
I began to tell of a funeral march made of burial and the absence of burials, made of aqua­ma­tions, made of cuts... made of singing ances­tors in the forms of trees and regen­er­ating waters.

Business as usual - hos­tile envi­ron­ment, Alberta Whittle
16min04
With the hor­rors of covid-19 over­shad­owing the everyday, this chapter forms part of Alberta Whittle’s wider com­mis­sion for Glasgow Sculpture Studios and Glasgow International that has been devel­oped to reflect the imme­diacy of our times. But most of all, it is an offering and a ges­ture towards remaining soft in spite of the over­whelming hos­tile envi­ron­ment.

This pro­­gram is part of the Académie de Bétonsalon sup­­ported by the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation.

Images

Talk about " A society without school " with Patricia Falguières, Rasha Salti, Koyo Kouoh and Dulcie Abrahams Atlass, RAW Académie, Breathing out of school, Bivouac #2, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, September 25th, 2020.

Talk about " A society without school " with Patricia Falguières, Rasha Salti, Koyo Kouoh and Dulcie Abrahams Atlass, RAW Académie, Breathing out of school, Bivouac #2, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, September 25th, 2020.

Conversations on the need to take a break, "Gap Year" with Éric Baudelaire, Sandrine Honliasso, Khalil Joreige, Ariane Leblanc and Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy, RAW Académie, Breathing out of school, Bivouac #2, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, September 26th, 2020.

Conversations on the need to take a break, "Gap Year" with Éric Baudelaire, Sandrine Honliasso, Khalil Joreige, Ariane Leblanc and Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy, RAW Académie, Breathing out of school, Bivouac #2, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, September 26th, 2020.

Film screen­ings of former RAW Académie Fellows : Noor Abed, Freya Emondes, Ash Moniz, Hira Nabi, Stefano Pelosato, Esther Poppe, Narcis Dias Pujol, Frida Robles, Naomi Lulendo, RAW Académie, Breathing out of school, Bivouac #2, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, September 25th, 2020.

Film screen­ings of former RAW Académie Fellows : Mustafa Boga, Shirin Sabahi, Felipe Steinberg, Anna Tjé, Alberta Whittle, RAW Académie, Breathing out of school, Bivouac #2, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, September 26th, 2020.

P.O de Chagrin, per­­for­­mance by Naomi Lulendo, artist and former RAW Académie par­tic­i­pant, Breathing out of school, Bivouac #2, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, September 25th, 2020.

Safou lover, per­for­mance by Anna Tjé, artist and former RAW Académie par­tic­i­pant, Breathing out of school, Bivouac #2, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, September 26th, 2020.

Safou lover, per­for­mance by Anna Tjé, artist and former RAW Académie par­tic­i­pant, Breathing out of school, Bivouac #2, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, September 26th, 2020.