RAW Material Company is pleased to invite you to the vox-ARTIS* talk with artist, researcher and film programmer Janilda Bartolomeu moderated by Massamba Mbaye at Zone B, rue sans soleil, Villa 2A at 5pm on March 12th 2025 with an interval to break our fast with a ndogou.
“The Twelfth Island: As We Surrender to the Tides” is a long-term investigation into the undocumented histories of the Cape Verdean communities migratory trajectories. The project reflects upon its diaspora’s rich historical migratory spirit. It seeks to perceive the community’s specters in the past and present, unravel their movements, and to activate their futures’ developments and trajectories.
This multi-stage project, led by Janilda Bartolomeu, RAW Material Company and the Nieuwe Instituut, acts as a bridge between our two cities. A Dakar - Rotterdam - Dakar.
Technically, one of Janilda’s usual strategies is first creating her own opaque archive, by going into the community carrying a small camera set-up and/or audio recorder to assemble her own reflections as well as those shared by the community themselves. She is starting to experiment with personal archives community members offer her in the form of personal video footage, photographs, recordings and other materials. Lastly she also aims to interweave her latter work with traces from institutional archives - to see what those relations may bring forth. The material and immaterial will be woven and re-woven in different ways so the spectres of The Twelfth Island are able to manifest through various imaginative techniques (superimpositions, space-time breeches, image-sound fracturing) rather than creating transparent, passive archives. This will be digital film as a means to embody the agency and the migratory spirit of the Cape Verdean community in subject, process and outcome. This lens will allow us to perceive spectres in the form of humans, memories and historical silences, allow them to materialize and occupy urban space again, as well as allow the community to shape their imaginations about the future.
During her residency, Janilda Bartolomeu engages with prominent figures of the Cape Verdean community in Dakar, who play a vital role in preserving the culture, heritage and traditions of the motherland. Through the encounter with the stories of activists and organizers, in their own right, from music, poetry to history, operating as an ecosystem, allowed her to realize the multilayered complexity of the existence of the Cape Verdean community within the territory. Community organizer and musical figure Daniel Gomes shares his extensive knowledge of the history of the settlement after the clandestine voyage, as well as the evolution of sound and music, making Dakar a passage point. A balade in Plateau takes us through the many inhabited streets of families and their businesses (barbers, restaurants) or sites constructed or operated made of cape verdean labor such as the port, ending on the steps of the cathedral Notre-Dame-of-Victories. Mix Teixeira, a guardian and initiator of Cape Verdean music and celebration of San Jon in Dakar, shares his duty to document and educate as a connector to the source of their origins by way of journalism. The Ladies of the Troupe Strela Cadenti (Shooting Stars) embody the essence of their name, embracing their culture of Batukadeiras, a hybrid of music (educational lyricism and multi-rhythmed) and dance as a healing and comforting vessel. Meanwhile, Marie Alice Awadi-Sanon, a prominent instructor in the educational system in the 80s with a deep love for poetry, shares growing up in Dakar and integrating different social groups and having a family of her own married to a Beninese. As Janilda pursues her quest, she also speaks with Clarence Thomas Delgado (filmmaker) and Luc Da Silva (curator of her father's visual legacy and documentation of the many communities settled in Dakar). They also share their childhood memories tied to seeing their elders living the notion of saudade and it becoming a vehicle to help anchor themselves within the context through religion, spirituality, and traditions, but as a means of transmission while creating a better life yet an important fabric of the senegalese social construct. Lili Lopes (artistic director) and Anne Laure Moreira-Mbaye (architect), coming from a very new perspective, share these feelings of desire to return to the source and/or to carry the pride of their identity, heritage, practice and tradition as a recurrent bond.
“The Twelfth Island: As We Surrender to the Tides” by Janilda Bartolomeu and RAW Material Company is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL as part of the Internationalization of the Design Sector Grant Scheme 2024, which runs between Dakar and the Netherlands in collaboration with the Nieuwe Instituut.