Still from A Letter from My Village, Safi Faye, (1975).
Welcome to the second seminar of the art series «Sensing: Between an amoeba and an atom» at Kunsthall Trondheim. April 4. we invite you to an exhibition tour in «Sowing Somankidi Coura. A generative Archive», a lecture «Refusing to be Resilient Thusly: Soil, Care and Postcolonial Futures» by Shela Sheikh and a screening of «A Letter From My Village» (1976) by Safi Faye, a program proposed by Raphaël Grisey.
«Sensing: Between an amoeba and an atom» is anchored and angered in art as a praxis and habitat, care as research and decolonizing the nature of structural and infrastructural paths of violence for more than human times. This series is a collaboration between Kunsthall Trondheim, GAMES GAIA Geoengineering (Art beyond the Anthropocene) and Prof. Susanne M. Winterling (Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, NTNU).
This seminar will be held in English.
Free admission.
SEMINAR PROGRAM:
5pm
Guided tour in the exhibition «Sowing Somankidi Coura. A generative Archive» together with Raphaël Grisey, Bouba Touré and Diol Mouhamadou (Kàddu Yaraax).
The exhibition examines the history of the permaculture and archives of «Somankidi Coura», a self-organized cooperative at the Senegal River in Mali that was founded by a group of former African migrants and activists in France in 1977 after the Sahel was hit by a severe draught.
6.30pm
Lecture: «Refusing to be Resilient Thusly: Soil, Care and Postcolonial Futures» by Shela Sheikh
Shela Sheikh is Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths (University of London), where she convenes the MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy and co-chairs the Goldsmiths Critical Ecologies Research Stream. She lectures and publishes internationally. Her research interrogates various forms of witnessing, between the human, technological and environmental. A recent multi-platform research project around colonialism, botany and the politics of planting includes “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions”, a special issue of Third Text co-edited with Ros Gray (vol. 32, issue 2–3, 2018), and Theatrum Botanicum (Sternberg Press, 2018) edited with Uriel Orlow, as well as numerous workshops on the topic with artists, filmmakers and environmentalists.
8pm
Screening of «A Letter From My Village» by Safi Faye (1976)
Safi Faye (b. 1943) made her first short film, La Passante, in 1972, and in 1975 she became the first sub-Saharan African woman to direct a feature film: Kaddu Beykat (Letter from My Village). Faye is today recognized as one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s most prominent directors. Centred on a romance, Kaddu Beykat (Letter From My Village) chronicles the daily lives of people in Fadjal, a rural Senegalese village, and their struggle with the state land policies, and agricultural politics.
This screening is supported by La cinémathèque Afrique and Institut Francais.
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April 5, 6 and 7:
In relation to the exhibition «Sowing Somankidi Coura. A generative Archive», and in collaboration with LevArt we welcome you to participate in the workshop «Figuring Fallow Time».
The workshop will be held together with Bouba Touré and Mouhamadou Diol from the Theatre of the Oppressed company Káddu Yaraax in Dakar at Levart on April 5, 6 and 7. Through methods of the Theatre of the Oppressed the workshop will focus on the politics of Nordic and Sahelian agro-pastoral ecosystems, migration and translation of situated knowledge, neocolonial violence and climate change.