02 Jul 2022

Assembly of Mutants

As part of its contribution to the Assembly of Mutants – a project initiated by Oulimata Gueye, Hamedine Kane and Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro - RAW Material Company invites you to participate in the following program Saturday July 2nd, 2022 at 6pm

 
The Assembly of Mutants  acknowledges the necessity to develop a critique of our present moment based on actual experimentation. In a week-long gathering, we explore the idea of University based on a historical retrospective, and examination of current initiatives and speculation on potential new models. 
 
In line with previous investigations of African post-independence educational utopias by the School of Mutants, this Assembly explores situated pedagogies. It takes the form of an ephemeral and itinerant school, based on the encounter and dialogue between experiences that face the need to expand, create and pluralize knowledge in mutating territories. 
 

Skipping school !
On orality, performance, and poetry. 

18h00-20h00 

RAW x l’École des Mutants: Correspondances 

Leviathan episode 7: Africana, Ken Bugul & Nemo
Film screening by Shezad Dawood

Ntone Edjabe: World Music - poem (Zoom)

Thierno Seydou Sall and Fehe: Recital - piece created for the exhibition D'une rive à l'autre 

Leuz Diwane G: Spoken word transmutation 
 
 

Leviathan 
Episode 7: Africana, Ken Bugul & Nemo 
By Shezad Dawood 
Trailer available here

Leviathan is an ambitious interdisciplinary project which looks at the urgent question of our times: how do we understand the intersection between climate change, migration and mental health in our shared ecosystem? 

The 10-part film series envisages a future eerily like our present. Set approximately 20-50 years from now, the larger narrative follows a migratory journey (paralleled in the non-human world) across Europe, Asia, North Africa and beyond, encountering a series of idiosyncratic communities along the way. Taking a global and collective approach, Leviathan looks at what is increasingly not only a humanitarian crisis but a wider systemic crisis within our biosphere; the series becomes a reflection of where we might end up if a deeper understanding of trauma and climate erosion is not found. 

Episode 7 of Leviathan is the fruit of Shezad Dawood's online residency at RAW Material Company, and is anchored in the Senegal of 2050. 
 
 
Biographies/
Leuz Diwane G
Leuz Diwane G is an author and composer. Born in Mbao, he participated in the album of all right dou fayewith a sound entitled Underground. With the title So Confused, a song included in the Afrik Hip Hop Mixtape Vol. 2, which brings together various rappers from several African countries, Leuz Diwane G has made his mark on Senegalese hip hop.
 
Ntone Edjabe
Ntone Edjabe is a journalist and DJ, and the founder of Chimurenga (established 2002, Cape Town), a pan African platform for reflection and action - through the Pan African Space Station, the Chimurenga Library, the Chronic, and more. The title Chimurenga refers to the Shona word for ‘struggle’, as well as to a popular music genre in Zimbabwe. Ntone Edjabe’s practice as a DJ weds musical erudition and explicit political engagement centered on Africa’s place in the world. 
 
Shezad Dawood
Shezad Dawood works across the disciplines of painting, film, neon, sculpture, performance, virtual reality and other digital media to ask key questions of narrative, history and embodiment. Using the editing process as a method to explore both meanings and forms, his practice often involves collaboration and knowledge exchange, mapping across multiple audiences and communities. Through a fascination with the esoteric, otherness, the environment and architectures both material and virtual, Dawood interweaves stories, realities and symbolism to create richly layered artworks.
 
Thierno Seydou Sall
Thierno Seydou Sall Since he was a child, Thierno has been under the spell of poetry. At that young age, his head seemed to be "full of crazy ideas", which set him apart from others. His poetic roots are mainly in the rural villages where he has worked for many years with local and international organizations. A 'wandering poet', he has nevertheless published several collections of poetry in Wolof and French, including Kër DofBouffées délirantes and L'Envol des pélicans, prefaced by the Senegalese novelist Cheikh Hamidou Kane. His poems both affirm and challenge local and traditional cultures and values, and challenge his audiences, regardless of age, gender or status, to stand up for the environment, equality and social justice, especially in relation to women and children. Sall has also collaborated with musicians, and is increasingly working with new media, television, radio and digital platforms to share his work.
 
Youssoupha Fehe Sarr
Youssoupha Fehe Sarr is an artist, researcher, author, composer and translator living in Dakar. Passionate about orality with a strong interest in the transmission and production of knowledge, he has a career marked by transdisciplinarity. Having studied Language, Literature and Civilizations of the English-speaking World at the University Gaston Berger of Saint-Louis, he developed an interest in orality for his master's degree. The dissertation he then wrote entitled "Contemporary Verbal Arts and Cultural Identity Reconstruction in Senegalese Rap and Slam Poetry " focused on the role that contemporary verbal arts such as Rap and Slam could play in the process of recreating cultural identities in Senegal. Fehe is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the ARCIV laboratory at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, where he is conducting research in the field of African Studies (Literatures and Societies of Africa), again on Senegalese Rap. He is the co-founder of Firi, a platform for the translation, production and dissemination of artistic, academic and informational content in local languages, through logics related to orality as an order of knowledge.
 

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