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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: D25-02. To panel D25.

Title of paper:

Authors:

Anja Veirman (LUCA School of Arts Ghent);

Tiecoura N'Daou (Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers Multimédia Balla Fasseké Kouyaté).

Long abstract paper:
We will present the project 'Making mud cloth - Textile Dialogues', an international collaboration between the Senufo Cultural Centre René Fournier (CCRF) in Bobo Dioulasso in Burkina Faso, the Malian multimedia artist Tiécoura N'Daou and the Belgian art historian/anthropologist Anja Veirman.

The CCRF is a small-scale museum and audio-visual documentation centre that works on the study, documentation and promotion of local knowledge and art practices. Thanks to the widespread networks and the engagement of a varied group of participants we started up a form of participatory multimedia ethnography with the focus on textile production and the rich cultural practices in which textiles are involved. The Senufo cultivate cotton and make fèrègè vaanyè mud cloth, garments that play an important role in conflict mediation, the expression of ritual and social identities and personal and collective aesthetics. But due to post-colonial exploitive structures the cultivators have limited access to their own raw materials and the benefices they create in the global capitalist textile industry.

Our interdisciplinary methodology, in which we engage photographic and digital video means, leads to the co-creation of audio-visual works such as a collaborative documentary and an experimental video installation with multiple narratives, which counter stereotypes and simplicity. Well-balanced co-creation can be a way to stay critical towards methodological questions of representation and the reproduction of unequal power relations in ethnographic research and audio-visual representations of cultural heritage. The project explores the possibilities, challenges and difficulties of cross-cultural co-creation, and one of the challenges is whether it's possible to construct multiple narratives that are able to evoke a transcultural experience (Willerslev & Shur, 2013).

From the perspective of the need for more symmetric research collaborations in our global power constellations and attempts to decolonize academia, the project wants to contribute to the creation of new ways of conducting research - and building and sharing - scholarship and co-creation.

References:

- Suhr, C. & Willerslev, R. (eds.) (2013). Transcultural Montage, Bergham Books.

- N'Daou, T. & Veirman, A. (2017). Portfolio. Pliable photo-appendix in Simulacrum.

- Veirman, A. (2017). Over maken en mediëren. Senufo-modderstof en de interrelatie tussen het rituele, sociale en artistieke maakproces. In: Simulacrum, 25, nr. 2, pp. 19-23.

- Veirman, A. (2018). Le Filafani - L'éclat des textiles senoufo teints à la terre / filafani. In Fini Fani, Une conversation autour des savoir-faire textiles au Mali, pp. 8-47. LUCA School of Arts.