[vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][vc_custom_heading heading_semantic=”h6″ text_size=”h6″ text_transform=”uppercase” text_color=”accent”]Curatorial[\/vc_custom_heading][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”8\/12″][vc_custom_heading heading_semantic=”h3″ text_size=”h1″ subheading=”Biennial, with Archive Ensemble, February to December 2024, Ancien Palais de Justice, Dak\u2019Art Biennale, Dakar”]ARCHIVE ENSEMBLE \u2013 HAPTIC LIBRARY<\/b>[\/vc_custom_heading][vc_empty_space empty_h=”2″][\/vc_column_inner][\/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”8\/12″][vc_custom_heading heading_semantic=”h4″ text_size=”h4″]A Flood is a Remembering: Communing in Catastrophe<\/i>[\/vc_custom_heading][vc_column_text text_lead=”small”]<\/p>\n
\u201c[T]he act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. \u2018Floods\u2019 is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.\u201d<\/em> \u201cWake: the track left on the water\u2019s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming or moved, in water; it is the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow. [\u2026] I mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un\/imaginable lives.\u201d<\/em> [\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space empty_h=”1″][\/vc_column_inner][\/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/2″][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n Inspired by Christina Sharpe\u2019s call for \u201cwake work\u201d as a fugitive and resistant means of inhabiting and rupturing dominant epistemes, and Toni Morrison\u2019s invitation to re-membering through floods of love and imagination, Archive Ensemble offers an overflowing space for deep listening, deviant learning, and riotous communion.<\/p>\n In the wake of constant historical catastrophes manufactured by hegemonic and heteronormative patriarchy (slavery, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and Zionism), we carefully take up both Sharpe\u2019s and Morrison\u2019s reflections as pedagogical gifts: if the movement of water found in the wake, and in floods, is the ruptural movement of re-membering what has been concealed and unloved, but also what cannot be contained and insurgently asks to be sensed, then what other swells of collective existences might we read, not as troubled deviations from a socialized norm but as threads of resilience, resistance, and remembrance against oppressive regimes?<\/p>\n A flood is a remembering: communing in catastrophe<\/em> navigates temporal and geographical boundaries, bringing together a myriad of misdiagnosed and misunderstood waves of knowledge transmission. It invites us to read the text(tures) of textiles, recite the prose of plaits, study the syntax of sonics, and generate citations of seeds and shouts. Hence, we are called to engage with the particular yet constitutive formations that characterise our living experiences by reopening forgotten archives, which are not confined to the written word, the finitude of the book, and the conventional idea of the library.<\/p>\n The very foundations of the library, commonly framed within the canonised image of a treasurable lieux de m\u00e9moire<\/em> or sites \u201cwhere memory crystallises and secretes itself\u201d (Pierre Nora), are problematised. Throughout history, and especially after the print revolution, libraries have become repositories of books, materials, and documents purposely selected to record and make public a specific model of knowledge based on concealments, censorship, and iterations aimed at consolidating a dominant narrative. Libraries have retraced colonial and imperialist practices, which, as Edward Said and Michel Foucault pointed out, were primarily \u201ctextual enterprises\u201d based on the entanglement of knowledge and power. As a result, libraries housing those textual enterprises have become a dangerous source of control. According to V.Y. Mudimbe, who coined the phrase \u201ccolonial library,\u201d imperialist accounts of Africa and other colonised regions of the world must be decentered. Knowledge must be released from present research systems that obscure the presence of other libraries, ways of thinking, and processes.<\/p>\n [\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1\/2″][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n It is in the wake of these suggested pathways and alternative publishing practices that Archive Ensemble presents the Haptic Library as an anti-colonialist library that re-imagines and reroutes the library as a souq, a fluid space for communal desire, an ark(he) of social justice not delimited by the hierarchies and individualistic logics of institutions, but given to excess, overflow, exchange, and collision not only as a methodology but as a study of ways of being that are inherent \u201cwith,\u201d \u201cacross,\u201d and \u201cthrough.\u201d Drawing inspiration from the word \u201chapticality,\u201d as proposed by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in The Undercommons<\/em>, the Haptic Library presents itself as a receptacle for extending \u201cthe capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you\u2026\u201d It questions the inherent dominance of sight and printed matter by bringing multiple approaches to inscribing and disseminating knowledge into proximity and encouraging interaction with a range of textural forms and modes of thought. Ultimately, it interrogates the politics of space by suggesting other ways of inhabiting sites of power.<\/p>\n As such, the Haptic Library infiltrates the Ancien Palais de Justice, a former courthouse and colonial architecture; it serves as a liquid laboratory of imagination and radical thinking. Here, the act of re-membering becomes a form of re-writing and resisting colonial narratives that have dis-membered affectivity, bonds, and entire cultures. Here, love provokes \u201cfloods and floods of blocked memories\u201d to break (Morrison). Here, the doors of justice swing open to several questions, since questioning signals the movement of thought about what the wake awaits and awakens.<\/p>\n How can floods of violently repressed archives break how we know the world? What if the iterative power of knowledge, as affirmed and reinforced by patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist paradigms, is replaced by \u201cunearthing and piecing together the fragmented members of existence\u201d (Jacqui M. Alexander)? What memory is disseminated through publishing virtuality, its capacity to re-imagine the wor(l)d as \u201ccontingency and possibility\u201d rather than \u201cnecessity and determinacy\u201d (Denise Ferreira da Silva)? How can publishing be activated as the ground for collective solidarity and inseparability, and participate in undoing fixed boundaries? \u201cWhat is opportunity in the wake of catastrophe, and how is opportunity always framed?\u201d (Sharpe).<\/p>\n As we navigate the turbulent currents of the present moment, let us embark on a journey of wake work, reclaiming agency, and forging pathways towards liberation and the consciousness that we are part of a living memory that, like a flood, cannot be contained but instead requires us to hold together and \u201cdare yearning for each other\u201d in power and love (Alexander). Holding steadfast to our capacity to commune in the wake of catastrophe, unashamed if they call it a riot or protest, delinquent or delusional, unlawful or unsanctioned, for Morrison reminds us, \u201c\u2018floods\u2019 is the word they use, but in fact, it is not flooding; it is remembering.\u201d<\/p>\n [\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text text_lead=”small”]<\/p>\n Archive Ensemble, Dakar, 2024<\/em><\/p>\n The Haptic Library is part of Archive Ensemble\u2019s research formation \u201cPublishing Practices,\u201d which studies extended publishing possibilities by uncovering other ancestral knowledge and extra-logical thinking.<\/p>\n Artists:<\/strong> Zineb Achoubie & Lorenzo Sandoval, Rashida Bumbray, Banji Chona, Diana Ejaita, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Keren Lasme, Elsa M\u2019bala, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Katy L\u00e9na Ndiaye, Sara Ouhaddou, Lerato Shadi<\/p>\n Curators (Archive Ensemble):<\/strong> Mistura Allison, Kany Ndiaye Sarr, Chiara Figone, Samira Ghoualmia, Kennedy Jones, Salma Kossemtini, Tabara Korka Ndiaye<\/p>\n [\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column_inner][\/vc_row_inner][vc_empty_space empty_h=”2″][vc_gallery el_id=”gallery-284294″ medias=”84417,84413,84414,84415,84416,84418,84419,84420,84421,84422″ gutter_size=”3″ media_items=”media|lightbox|original,icon,description” screen_lg=”1000″ screen_md=”600″ screen_sm=”480″ single_overlay_opacity=”50″ single_padding=”2″][vc_column_text text_lead=”small”]<\/p>\n Photos: Salma Kossemtini<\/em><\/p>\n [\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][vc_empty_space empty_h=”2″][vc_column_text text_lead=”small”]<\/p>\n Dak\u2019Art, Biennale de l\u2019Art Africain Contemporain \u2197<\/a><\/p>\n Dak\u2019Art Biennale 2024, Contemporary And \u2197<\/a><\/p>\n [\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1\/1″][vc_custom_heading heading_semantic=”h6″ text_size=”h6″ text_transform=”uppercase” text_color=”accent”]Press[\/vc_custom_heading][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n
Toni Morrison, \u201cThe Site of Memory\u201d<\/p>\n
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake<\/p>\n