Son[i]a #337
Raw Material Company
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Based in Dakar, Senegal, Raw Material Company is an independent, collaborative centre that aims to foster critical thinking through artistic practice. The project was founded in 2008 at the initiative of curator Koyo Kouoh, with a socially committed, pan-African, translocal vision and a programme that revolves around the research, promotion and dissemination of contemporary culture in and from Africa. From the perspective of the RAW Material Company, curatorial practice is an expanded exercise in knowledge production that goes beyond exhibitions. It encompasses artistic education and public programmes, as well as residencies, a library, an archive, publications, and even podcasts. All these tools are used to weave networks and communities that implement critical thought from a perspective of collectivity and care in which fragility and vulnerability are understood as a crack and a source of power to generate change.
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. Actions that can be as small as opening up a space in which to be together, to unlearn and rethink the emancipatory possibilities that art can offer society.
Kathrin Böhm
In this podcast, we open up a glossary of concepts that affect and leave their mark on Kathrin Böhm's many constellations and collective projects. From the notion of compost—which triggered a radical shift in her way of working and interacting with her material archive in recent years—to a reassessment of the very idea of economy, which, as Katherine Gibson writes, helps us discern spaces of value production that are not immediately apparent. We talk about how these other strategies and ways of doing things lead us to qualify and problematise alternative ways of understanding social and/or participatory practices, and even to read the idea of community critically.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with Marie Hélène Pereira and Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy—two key members of Raw Material Company—. We talk about connecting locally, about working with and empowering Afro communities, about keeping the archive alive, and about working with orality.
Mônica Hoff
Mônica Hoff talks about epistemological Dadaism and education in public, about institutions that learn, dissent as a strategy to generate movement and thought, scales, micropoltics, and the cracks in which everything happens, and about slowing down, or even stopping.
Faka
Desire Marea and Fela Gucci talk about performing masculinity and self-policing, vulnerability, Siyakaka feminism, South African pop culture in the 90s, racialised queer bodies, music as a medium and dealing with contradictions.
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
We talk with Lucía Piedra Galarraga, Diego Falconí Travez and Karo Moret from the Study Group on Afro/Black Ideas, Practices, and Activisms about altars, ekekos, nefandos, Saint Barbara, and Valdivia's Siamese twins. They turn their attention to the politics of hair, talk about sugar as the star product plying the Caribbean routes, and acknowledge the usefulness of ashes in proving the extermination of the ancient Andean sodomite communities.
Oyèrónké Oyèwùmi
Professor Oyèrónké Oyèwùmi examines the ways in which universalism in academia distorts our understanding of African cultures, especially in relation to race and gender. In this podcast, Professor Oyèwùmi talks about age, seniority, and respect, about unscrupulousness and academia, dispossession and spirituality. She considers the oxymoron of the notion of “single mother” from the point of view of Yoruba culture, and she also notes how observance of community practices from non-Western cultures may be a necessary step as we face the planetary challenges to come.
Els Opsomer
The Belgian artist Els Opsomer talks 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.