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Translation as Hospitality
Assembly
8/08/23 7pm
Free
RSVP below to attend this in person event.
Join this assembly with Hamedine Kane and Stephane Bottero from the School of Mutants and explore the potential for translation as hospitality. The collective will share their ideas on tools for solidarity communication and their research on the Afrihili language.
Afrihili was created by Ghanaian historian K.A. Kumi Attobrah in the early 1970s as ‘a New International Language created from all the languages in Africa for all the peoples of Africa’.
The gathering will include conversations, readings, participatory activities around language and translation, Pan-African music with Chickie and screenings of extracts by renowned filmmakers Sembene Ousmane and Souleymane Cissé.
More participants tba.
The School of Mutants is a collaborative platform for art and research initiated in 2018 in Dakar, Senegal. Working across geographies and engaging with socio-cultural, ecological, and aesthetic mutations of the real, the collective aims to mobilize spaces for the production, transmission, and pluralization of knowledge in non-hierarchical ways. Departing from research into the educational infrastructures and pedagogical utopias that emerged in post-independence Senegal and West Africa, the collective reflects on the legacies of African futurism, Non-Aligned Movement and Southern solidarities and imagines new practices of mutual, decolonised learning. Their work takes shape as publications and films, public assemblies, field and archival research, and collective learning situations. The collective borrows its name from the University of Mutants, established in 1978 on the island of Gorée, known for experimental knowledge sharing and challenging the Western epistemological authority.
Hamedine Kane, a Senegalese and Mauritanian artist and director, lives and works between Brussels and Dakar. Through his practice, Kane frequents borders, not as signs and factors of impossibility, but as places of passage and transformation, as a central element in the conception of an itinerant identity. After ten years of exile in Europe, his practice now focuses on themes of memory and heritage. In his work, past and future are intertwined, transgressing and irrigating the boundaries of space and time. In 2020 Kane participated in the Momenta biennial in Montreal, and in various exhibitions as part of the Africa 2020 season in France. His film The Blue House, which had its world premiere at the IDFA in Amsterdam in November 2020, received the special mention of the jury.
Stéphane V. Bottéro is an artist working at the intersection of social practice, installation, writing, gardening and cooking. He is interested in the entanglements of community, materiality, body and place. Based on site-specific research and durational interventions, his practice explores pedagogies of repairing. His work has been exhibited at biennales, museums, and festivals, including: ZKM, Karlsruhe; Centre Pompidou Metz; 12th Berlin Biennale; 14th Dakar Biennale; RAW Material Company, Dakar; 12th Taipei Biennial; 7th Oslo Triennale; Le Lieu Unique, Nantes; Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; Sheffield DocFest.
Chickie is a DJ, writer and co-founder of London-based techno platform Bleached Club. With her sonic style drawing upon both the pioneering electronic sounds of the Black American diaspora, and the addictive rhythms of Senegalese nightlife, she has cultivated her collection to evoke collective trance, rebellion and discovery from Berlin to Bristol.
Images 1-3: Courtesy of The School of Mutants.
Image 4: Photography by Izzy Wylie. Courtesy of Chickie.