ICA Opens New Show on "Thinking Africa" Through Film, Workshops, and Translation

While the exhibition centers around contemporary African thought and life practices, artist Christian Nyampeta describes the show as “planetary in scope.” “It's for all of us,” says ICA curator Michelle Yeonho Hyun. “It's this fundamental question of how do we live together with difference and with conflict, or as Nyampeta says, ‘in the wake of radical rupture?’” Just like the night school referenced in the exhibition’s name, École du soir is meant to be engaged with and visited several times, Hyun explains. “It's making a space and creating a time for these activities.”

The exhibition is the fourth part in the ICA’s artistic research series, Another Knowledge Is Possible (2021-24). Exploring knowledge that emerges from language, film and translation, École du soir creates space for dialogue and collaboration, in which community members can come together and share ideas on building a cooperative future and on “thinking Africa.” 

_{Video still from Sometimes It Was Beautiful, created by Christian Nyampeta in 2018. Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm.}

In an interview with WIELS, Nyampeta described “the awful linguistic divide between English, French and Portuguese within African studies.” Thinking towards a future for African studies means that the act of translation is one that is both critical and one that must be examined critically. “The divide is obviously not an essence of Africanity but a consequence of its history, marked by colonial domination,” he said. 

Nyampeta’s interest in this divide helped inspire the choice of the exhibition name. “I am particularly interested in the word [École du soir] in French used in English," he said, “because this approach helps to lessen the cultural divide that so often exists between French speaking African worlds and those speaking English, despite the sharing of a common destiny.”

Entering the exhibition space, a centrally-placed colorful platform in the shape of a flower is meant to be a centerpiece for the cooperative thinking the exhibition hopes to encourage. The show will feature a series of seminars and workshops all brought together upon this platform. 

“The workshops offer meaningful and long lasting encounters with artistic methods that engage with the social environment, cultural invention, and creative vivacity from regions that are not often engaged with in the same way in Shanghai,” said Nyampeta. “But the exhibition and the workshop do not claim to offer discovery of new worlds or the rescue of African worlds by bringing them to China. The spaces, regions, people, stories or histories gathering within the exhibition and workshops stage a space for learning simply by visiting Shanghai.”

In one of the workshops, hosted by the Woodcut Wavement collective, a self-organized inter-Asian woodcut printmaking group, participants will learn about the ways in which printmaking has been used to create social and political change throughout China, and then create their own DIY prints. 

_{Video still from Sometimes It Was Beautiful, created by Christian Nyampeta in 2018. Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm.}

Lubumbashi-based artists Feza Kayungu Ramazani and Prodige Tumba Makonga will lead a second workshop on sustainability practices and art. Participants will learn how to make toys from copper wire, a material which is often dumped in neighborhoods surrounding factories in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and is then repurposed by children into imaginative toys. The workshops welcome participants of all ages, though advance registration is required. 

The exhibition program also includes two screenings of A Song About Love, a set of music videos as visual poems presented by the African Film Institute, and a series of translation workshops, in which attendees are invited to think collaboratively and critically about the act of translation through movement and everyday experience. For more information and to register to attend, please see the ICA’s spring calendar. 

_{Portrait of Christian Nyampeta. Courtesy the artist.}