Mbari is a visual art form practiced by the Igbo people in southeast Nigeria consisting of a sacred house constructed as apropitiatory rite. Mbari houses of the Owerri-Igbo, which are large opened-sided square planned shelters contain many life-sized, painted figures (sculpted in mud to appease the Alusi (deity) and Ala, the earth goddess, with other deities of thunder and water).Other sculptures are of officials, craftsmen, foreigners (mainly Europeans), animals, legendary creatures and ancestors. Mbari houses take years to build and building them is regarded as sacred. A ceremony is performed within the structure for a gathering of town leaders. After the ritual is complete, going in or even looking at the Mbari house is considered taboo. The building was not maintained and decayed in the elements.
Chaque fois que les liens familiaux se défaisaient, chaque fois qu'on se dressait contre son semblable, l'Histoire se répétait. Douloureusement, impitoyablement, dans un entre-soi subsaharien. La traite négrière était à inscrire au patrimoine tragique du genre humain. Parce qu'elle avait impliqué des régions différentes du monde. Parce que les bourreaux n'avaient pas été que d'un seul côté. Parce qu'elle était, à cette échelle-là, le premier crime contre l'humanité dont on ait gardé trace. Celui qui trop longtemps ignoré, avait engendré les autres. Une fois qu'on avait réduit des humains à cela, qu'hésiterait-on à commettre? Devant quoi reculerait-on? Aux quatre coins du monde on se surpasserait pour défier l'horreur. La zone subsaharienne du Continent était concernée au premier chef. Elle avait été la source unique du trafic. On ne s'étaient pas servi ailleurs. Et depuis, les rapports de cette région avec le reste du monde demeuraient les mêmes. Elle était le puits sans fond d'où les autres tiraient leur croissance. Et, comme par le passé, il se trouvait toujours une main autochtone pour participer au crime. Les soulèvements populaires observés çà et là, loin du regard de la Communauté internationale, ne venaient jamais à bout des régimes scélérats. Le mal venait de loin.
Léonora Miano, Les aubes écarlates. Sankofa cry. Plon, 2009.
Dakar le 26 mai 2014. Selly Raby Kane, fashion designer, envahit l'ancienne gare ferroviaire de Dakar avec ses créatures mi alien mi cartoon. Le photographe ivoirien Paul Sika, le collectif de Ouakam Les Petites Pierres, sont mis à contribution pour faire le show et remettre au centre l'énergie urbaine dakaroise !
Future Sound of Mzansi - Documentary Trailer Johannesburg, ville mélomane, productrice de la première musique électronique du continent, le Kwaito, héritière revendiquée de l'Afrofuturisme avec Spoek Mathambo en figure de proue, scène de théâtre du ballet pantomime de musiciens dégingandés à l'instar d'un dj spoko. Tout cela méritait bien un film. Nthato Mokgata (aka Spoek Mathambo) s'y est attelé et on attend avec impatience de le voir en France.
Lagos Photo Festival 5th Edition ‘Staging Reality, Documenting Fiction’ October 25 - November 26, 2014
http://www.lagosphotofestival.com
Gerald Machona: Vabvakure (People from Far Away) (Zimbabwe)
Artist Statement: “Central to this body of work is my use of various decommissioned currencies as an aesthetic material,” explains Machona, “in an attempt to link historic and contemporary trends of African diasporic migration on the continent. Most recently, the migration of Zimbabwean nationals into neighbouring SADC countries and abroad, following the country’s political and economic collapse. While South Africa hosts the largest population of these Zimbabwean nationals living in the diaspora, in May of 2008 they were amongst the foreign nationals persecuted by the xenophobic attacks. It was reported that people were targeted through a process of profiling that assumed authentic South Africans are lighter in complexion or fluent in an indigenous language; this resulted in 21 of the 62 casualties being local citizens. Such beliefs have complicated who is considered an ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ in South African society. Pitting ‘native’ against ‘alien’ and perpetuating an exclusive sense of belonging that is reminiscent of apartheid doctrine. There is a growing need in the post-colony to deconstruct these notions of individual and collective identity, since ‘nations’, ‘nationalisms’ and ‘citizenry’ are no longer defined solely through indigeneity or autochthony.”
« J'appelle Chaos-monde le choc actuel de tant de cultures qui s'embrasent, se repoussent, disparaissent, subsistent pourtant, s'endorment ou se transforment, lentement ou à vitesse foudroyante : ces éclats, ces éclatements dont nous n'avons pas commencé de saisir le principe ni l'économie et dont nous ne pouvons pas prévoir l'emportement. Le Tout-Monde, qui est totalisant, n'est pas (pour nous) total. Et j'appelle Poétique de la Relation ce possible de l'imaginaire qui nous porte à concevoir la globalité insaisissable d’un tel chaos-monde. »
Edouard Glissant. Traité du Tout-Monde, Paris, Gallimard, 1997.
August Černigoj, The Rebellion of the Young, 1972
"I have tried to suggest that precarity is the condition against which several new social movements struggle. Such movements do not seek to overcome interdependency or even vulnerability as they struggle against precarity; rather, they seek to produce the conditions under which vulnerability and interdependency become liveable. This is a politics in which performative action takes bodily and plural form, drawing critical attention to the conditions of bodily survival, persistence and flourishing within the framework of radical democracy. If I am to lead a good life, it will be a life lived with others, a live that is no life without those others. I will not lose this I that I am; whoever I am will be transformed by my connections with others, since my dependency on another, and my dependability, are necessary in order to live and to live well. Our shared exposure to precarity is but one ground of our potential equality and our reciprocal obligations to produce together conditions of liveable life. In avowing the need we have for one another, we avow as well basic principles that inform the social, democratic conditions of what we might still call ‘the good life’. These are critical conditions of democratic life in the sense that they are part of an ongoing crisis, but also because they belong to a form of thinking and acting that responds to the urgencies of our time."
"Can one lead a good life in a bad life?" Judith Butler, Adorno Prize Lecture.
Space and Modernism in Ghanaian Architecture
Commissioned work by South African freelance photographer Alexia Webster. This particular series is spellbounding in the way that it captures public spaces in Urban Africa. The series provokes the viewer to reinterpret architectural structures and you feel as though you are caught in between the present, past and future where the objects in the photos appear to be both geometrically ordered and…
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"Of whom and of what are we contemporaries? And, first and foremost, what does it mean to be contemporary?" Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?, Paris, Rivages, 2008. Photo: Icarus 13, Kiluanji Kia Henda
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