RAW Académie is an experimental and experiential program for the research and study of artistic practice, artistic thought and curatorial practice. It invites a lively reflection on art research, curatorial practice and critical writing. If we see the Académie as a place for transforming our methods, for reflecting on them and for transmitting non-hierarchical knowledge between all program participants, it seems essential to open up involvement to the beneficiaries of this program, so that they can show and share what their practice has become, after their passage through the program.

Therefore, following on from the group show The Educational Web, held at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 2023, RAW Material has seized the moment to take over a space. And rather than demonstrating the RAW method through an exhibition of archives, it is taking this idea a step further and actually occupying the space in an assertive way: by giving a voice to the primary interested parties to address the question of knowledge transmission, and by showing how it can reflect, speak and build from and with the community.

 

We designed this carte blanche to consist of three parts. The first is a Reading room implemented by Untitled Duo (Yvon Langué & Soukaina Aboulaoula), on the practice of the RAWAcadémie as an entry point for mapping the initiatives that have transformed the continent in terms of artistic and cultural education. The second is a residency led by writer, curator and filmmaker Renée Akitelek Mboya, with the aim of developing a methodology from the Spanish context, in connection with the Afro-diasporic community. It will result in the production of a film and a solo exhibition of her practice. The third iteration is a group show curated by Amina Lawal Agoro on the question of Afro-diasporic identities and communities, with the aim of demonstrating the mechanisms of cooperation that have been put in place between different women artists.

May our song be worthy of those who listen

The first part of this collaboration began on March 9, 2024 with an opening attended by the program's curators, Untitled duo_Yvon Langué & Soukaina Aboulaoula, Renée Akitelek Mboya & Amina Lawal Agoro, Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy & Delphine Buysse from RAW Material Company team including Marie-Hélène Pereira in her capacity as curatorial advisor. 

May our song be worthy of those who listen takes the shape of a reading room in which we display an interwoven tapestry of collective forms of being, I doing and (un)learning.
The opening conversation was followed by a screening of Ahmed Bouanani's film Mémoire 14* (1971, 25 minutes), followed by a conversation with Ali Essafi about his book Widen the Circle: An Obscure Experimentation in North African Avant-Garde Cinema (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2022).
*Courtesy Touda Bouanani — Les Archives Ahmed Bouanani.

The reading room offers an immersive encounter with RAW Académie over the course of its ten sessions, alongside a curated selection of materials that echo RAW's ethos and perception of knowledge production and its different modes of transmission and dissemination.

Additionally, the reading room serves as a platform for mapping a landscape of the different voices that work with, and around, flexible models of radical artistic pedagogies. In this sense, within the reading room, RAW acts equally as a case study and a narrator that recounts the non-linear journey of education as cultivated over its notion of laboratory and through its network.

The title is borrowed from Ahmed Bouanani's evocation of the storyteller at the beginning of his film Mémoire 14: "Widen the circle may God widen your graves blessed be the poet and the storyteller may our song be worthy of those who listen to us”. Further, it is a direct reference to the Halqa. (which translates to "the circle" in Arabic), an ancient form of storytelling in Morocco where the storyteller or narrator performs in public spaces * in a circular setting.

Beyond a mere storytelling arena, the Halqa is a space for collective movement, learning, archiving and gathering. It thus mirrors the essence encapsulated within the notion of study as employed in The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney: "Study is what you do with other people. It is talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice." 

Drawing upon this, the reading room expands upon the Halqa as a spatial, metaphorical and narrative conduit to create a space where trails of knowledge are continuously in the making.

The exhibition "May our song be worthy of those who listen" includes, Taught to Travel, 2022, a project curated by Moad Musbahi — a serie of short films commissioned to Dakar creatives (Arfan Barro, Diakus et Xelkoom, Moustapha Mballo Dieng, Halimatou Diallo, Mod’boye Diallo) in the framework of RAW residency program in February - March 2022. In collaboration with Harun Farocki Institute (funded by Goethe Institute Visual Art Fund).

An Elegy For An Exile Lost At Sea

The second part of this collaboration follows a residency led by curator and film-maker Renée Akitelek Mboya at La Casa Encendida. Entitled ‘An Elegy For An Exile Lost At Sea’, the aim of the residency was to develop a methodology based on the Spanish context, and in particular on the Lavapiés district, which for centuries has been an anchorage point for different generations of migrants... and more recently for the Afro-diasporic community. This neighborhood is also the home of La Casa Encendida, which for over twenty years has been thinking about and building its programming around this place, which has played a major part in shaping the institution's identity. This period of residency, during which Renée encountered the different layers that make up the identity of Lavapiés, gave rise to a number of questions, particularly ethical ones, which led her to slightly move the site and the subject of her research. In particular, she fleshed out her work with layers of audiovisual archives from different sources, challenging the processes of assimilation and the forms of education that preceded them... 

 

For those of you who will be in Madrid on Thursday 13 June 2024, you are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition ‘An Elegy For An Exile Lost At Sea’ by Renée Akitelek Mboya, which will be held from 7pm at La Casa Encendida - Ronda de Valencia, 2. 28012 - Madrid. On this occasion, Renée Akitelek Mboya will be in conversation with Fatima Bintou Rassoul SY (RAW Material Company, Director of Programmes). The exhibition will run from June 14 to September 01, 2024.

 

An Elegy For An Exile Lost At Sea is a work of speculative documentary using archival material compiled in collaboration with undocumented Senegalese migrants from the Lavapies community in Madrid.

Playing with the notion of the griot, An Elegy For An Exile Lost At Seainstrumentalises and proposes a poetic genealogy of contemporary migrant histories through moving image, photography and sound. Weaving together collective retellings, archival footage, photographs, sound archives, film references from the immediate post-independence period, as well as archival recordings from the Archives Culturelles du Senegal and narratives transmitted through social media (voice notes, video recordings, sermons) in collaboration with often invisible and undocumented storytellers, we prioritise shared retellings as a way of contributing to a contemporary archive of a largely marginalised, criminalised and forgotten population.

Together we worked to develop a database using phono-stylistic techniques that exist in a variety of African cultures - but specifically in the West African and Wolof speaking context (jat, nor nopp, mbabor) as an extension of the memory activism and archival practices of the griots. We hoped to reclaim these practices in the context of communities in exile and in transit. 

An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, sometimes used as a catch-all to denote texts of a sombre or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker of textual monumentalisation, and sometimes strictly as a sign of lamentation for the dead.