Son[i]a #180
Els Opsomer
Els Opsomer lives and works in Belgium and Senegal. She uses videos and photographs as a means to express the complexity of the world, which is visible in the many layers that make up the urban environment.
Her work springs from the huge archive that she has generated during her constant journeys – a compilation of personal comments and visual reinterpretations of the global reality. Each of her pieces is based on a specific story structured around the interpretative material that makes up this archive: images and reflections that the artist often calls ‘survival strategies’ or ‘messages for my friends’.
Her work has been exhibited at the Witte de With Center in Rotterdam and Robert Miller Gallery in New York, among others. She has participated in biennials in Brussels, Istanbul, Kwangju and Werkleitz, and was resident artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
SON[I]A talks to Els Opsomer about what travel and territories mean in her way of conceiving art, about how she builds up her archive and how it, in turn, generates her work. It also looks at some of the projects that Els has worked on in the past few years, including ‘iMovies’, ‘Archive Building’, and the video ’10th of November’, presented at the group exhibition ‘Avec le temps’.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Fatima El-Tayeb that we were unable to include the first time around.
Rasha Salti
Rasha Salti talks about the methodology of unearthing images that she uses in her research, and about some of its repercussions. Her postcolonial analysis of artistic production in modernism favours new narratives about the former East and West.
Vincent Meessen
Vincent Meessen talks about journeys, uprisings, and metaphors, about work cooperatives, music groups and constructed scenarios, about the politics of making versus the politics of showing, and about how to revivify lost or dying colonial memories in the present.
Raw Material Company
Based in Dakar, Senegal, Raw Material Company is an independent, collaborative centre that aims to foster critical thinking through artistic practice. In this conversation, Marie Hélène Pereira and Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy—two key members of Raw Material Company—discuss a situated feminist and decolonial practice that focuses on doing rather than enunciating and categorizing. They share some of their experiences and talk about the strategies they use to create rich forms of dialogue and to negotiate the tensions and the ideological and economic constraints imposed through the still-colonial structures of the so-called global North.