 |
 |
Programme: Years 1-3
Net / Works:
Trans-Local Cultures in the Making of African Worlds
As soon as reflection began, in 2003, around what would in time become the Africa Centre, one thing was certain: a key focus of the Centre would be a multidisciplinary, multi-sited programme of residences, conferences, workshops, performances, outreach initiatives and exhibitions. This programme is now entering its first year. Its name is SPARCK - Space for Panafrican Research Creation and Knowledge
SPARCK came into being in several stages. In 2003, a Reference Group of internationally renowned artists, scholars and writers was formed to begin reflecting on the goals, structure and programs of what would eventually become the Africa Centre. The members of the group were: Adegboyega Adefope, Bongi Dhlomo-Mautloa, Ntone Edjabe, Stanley Hermans, Faustin Linyekula, Dominique Malaquais, Olu Oguibe, Edgar Pieterse and AbdouMaliq Simone. Over the following two and half years, the group met regularly in Africa, Europe and North America (Cape Town, Johannesburg, Douala, New York, Paris). The foundations of SPARCK were laid during this time. The nature and structure of SPARCK, as well as the programme for its first three years, was then refined in 2007 by a team of three practitioners and scholars drawn from the Reference Group (Linyekula, Malaquais, Simone). Later that year, artist, educator and activist Kadiatou Diallo came on board as the program’s manager. Diallo and Malaquais now co-direct SPARCK, in consultation with Linyekula and Simone.
SPARCK brings individuals, grassroots organisations, creators’ collectives and teams of researchers together, both in Cape Town, South Africa, where the Africa Centre is based, and in multiple other locations across the continent, around themes central to contemporary life in the African world. SPARCK is a triennial project: it is constructed around three-year thematic modules. Through its many programmes, SPARCK aims to facilitate exchanges linking practitioners hailing from a wide range of fields, in person and virtually. It is a network-driven, multiple-platform project that will grow organically across time and space and in response to emerging ideas, needs and technologies. It is meant to foster novel, cross-disciplinary and translocal partnerships and projects, many of which will go on to have lives far beyond the Africa Centre.
Themes of SPARCK’s First Three Year Programme: General overview
Critical reflections on Africa today are peeling away the veneer of bad news and bad faith that has long characterized discourse about the continent, in order to highlight domains of vitality and efficacy. While they undoubtedly draw on historical antecedents and past imaginations, reflections of this kind are intensely contemporary. How, they ask, do actors across Africa today relate to, articulate and seek to remake the larger worlds in which they operate? Two areas of focus stand out: (1) the uses to which cities are put by various actors as mechanisms for constructing and renovating economies, cultures and selves; (2) the prolific insinuation of Africans into the global world through the intersection of migration, commerce and related diasporic practices. Urbanisation and trans-national commerce have historically constituted the key infrastructure for social and economic development across the world, and so it comes as little surprise that similar conduits are at work in Africa today.
Yet there is something striking about ways in which processes of urbanisation and structures of trans-national commerce operate in contemporary Africa. Despite the persistent efforts of states, multilateral organisations and a wide range of specialist institutions, all intent on bringing “order” to these processes and structures, the nature of urban change, the elaboration of cross-border and cross-continental exchange, and the structures of migratory movement to which these give rise follow neither consistent nor predictable economic formulas, rationalities or governance arrangements. Such an adamant “similar but different” trajectory does not reflect deep-seated African cultural peculiarities; it is driven by practices whose roots lie in combinations of poverty, political complexity and the existence, in close proximity to one another, of aspirations that often may not sit well with one another.
So the question is: What exactly is at work? What enables cities to act as dynamic machines in the midst of infrastructural collapse? While attention in the media is placed on the desperate efforts made by migrants to reach Europe on leaky boats, groups of commerçants from small provincial markets across the continent buy into apparel factories in China. As Melilla and Ceuta dominate the news, African video markets boom, engaging complex networks of production and exchange with the Indian sub-continent. How do these realities coexist? The challenge is that there are no unequivocally clear answers to this question. A thorough understanding of how things work, when they do indeed work, must consider how hundreds of deals, small and large, are made on a daily basis. In a region where it is not clear what the most well thought-out policies, development programmes, and business plans actually accomplish—and where assigning clear roles and responsibilities to specific actors and institutions is often neither possible nor a luxury inhabitants of the continent can afford—deals may be the only things that people have. In the realm of the deal, objects, people, and places that on the surface would seem to have nothing to do with each other come together, at least momentarily, to produce new opportunities and resources. Nations, in the classical sense of the term, cannot be built in this context—in this realm where things get done because, fleetingly, the time and the place is right for a particular collaboration and in which there is no telling whether what is possible today will be so tomorrow. Yet deals often work; money is made, people are fed and go places and create rich and engaging lives for themselves. In the process, multiple, entangled, nations are born – nations that often prove significantly more flexible, and as a result better adapted to the everyday existence of the continent than those born of colonisation’s violent cutting apart of Africa.
Given the importance of these considerations and taking advantage of the fact that they are on the minds of many people and organisations at the moment, deals, Diasporas and the cities that birth them will constitute the thematic focus for SPARCK’s first three-year programme. Entitled “Net / Works: Trans-Local Cultures in the Making of African Worlds,” this programme focuses on the cultural dynamics at work in three medium-sized cities. Located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Senegal, each of these cities is known for its role as a centre of highly effective deal-making—in trade, cross-border commerce, and migration—across the world. The three cities are Lubumbashi, Enugu and Touba. Each will be both a focus – a hub of SPARCK activities – and a platform – a gateway to other activities taking place or to be developed in related urban spaces across the African world. By mobilising various facets of artistic and media production, as well as academic deliberation, workshops exploring highly charged social issues, and outreach initiatives of various kinds, SPARCK’s first three-year programme will attempt to highlight how the manoeuvres, tactics and performances of deal-making actually work. Focusing, as broadly and originally as they wish, on concepts and practices of deal-making, on lives lived in the Diaspora and on urban environments born of such concepts, practices and lived experiences, creators in many fields – photography, film and video, installation and performance art, choreography, theatre, web and new media arts, poetry, prose and non-fiction writing – will generate works that highlight and bring to life for multiple audiences a wide range of issues facing the African world today. Audiences seeking scholarly or practical approaches to these issues will find them addressed in a host of other activities planned by SPARCK – conferences, roundtables, readings and hands-on workshops.
Focusing on medium-sized cities, each chosen for its global entrepreneurial proficiencies, allows for both a high degree of specificity and a wide variety of angles of approach. More importantly, it provides SPARCK’s first three-year programme with a concrete anchor—i.e. real places, manageable in size, that embody many of the problems of African urban management yet manage to get beyond these, to do something in the larger world that many other cities are not able to accomplish. At the same time, it opens up spaces to better understand how such places interact with and impact larger and often better known urban spaces. The problematic proposed presents SPARCK with a well-defined challenge. The three cities on which we concentrate encapsulate issues fundamental to the entire African region (and, in many cases, to its Diasporas as well), yet, at the same time, each is a highly individual place, with its own characteristics, demanding disciplined focus by those who seek to understand it. Any engagement with the social, economic, political and cultural spheres of each of the three cities will require ways of figuring out how to work with very specific personalities, communities, places and spaces of cultural production.
Why medium-sized cities when the region possesses real urban giants? There are several reasons. The giants, or primary urban areas (Dakar, Lagos, Kinshasa) – with swelling populations, overwhelming demands of resources and space, overcrowded informal sectors and weak industrialisation – have become increasingly dependent upon provisional accommodations and compensations, to the detriment of working out new production systems. Medium-sized cities often prove to be more viable spaces for generating innovation. Intense political contestations present in the primary cities, and the frequently arbitrary and repressive modes of decision-making and regulation that are brought to bear on these cities and their inhabitants, commonly prove paralyzing. In contrast, secondary cities often assume an important role as loci for deepening particular specialisations and incubating experiments that bring together different sectoral and territorial actors, prompting new forms of work and modes of action. These, in turn, may in time provide models for the larger cities. Additionally, the primary urban systems are increasingly disjoined from the national territories of which they are a part, and so medium-sized cities come to play an important role as mediators between various production systems, cultural orientations and shifting national affinities.
Also, it can be easier to engage the shadows of urban systems and spaces in smaller cities than in large ones, systems and spaces of deal-making that depend upon and bring into being complicated relationships between visibility and invisibility. Again, actors, places, materials and actions that, on the surface, would appear to have little to do with each other, actually connect, and in deploying these connections point to an architecture of migratory, trade, and resource flows that remains largely unexamined. These are urban realities that in large measure resist summation and synthesis. Investigations of places, lives and practices therein have, instead, to follow complex deal-making processes, using a toolbox that fosters different ways of looking at and representing things. Key among the tools available in such investigations are artistic practices and innovations – practices and innovations that intersect, at times in explosive fashion, with scholarly investigations born of the social sciences.
SPARCK actively rejects notions of “centre” and “periphery.” With this in mind, one of its primary goals is to work with cultural practitioners – to go to them rather than ask that they come to SPARCK – wherever they may be. Thus, while some residencies and related projects will take place in and around Cape Town, others will happen across the continent and beyond. Live-feed Internet connections, film projections, radio links and blogs will allow wide-ranging participation by heterogeneous and far-flung publics and foster horizontal networks of exchange and engagement. As people, institutions and places, projects, art works, performances and texts come together over the course of the first three-year programme, it is expected that novel ideas and undertakings will emerge, increasing the richness and complexity of what promises to be a groundbreaking experiment in Pan-African exchange.
Details about SPARCK projects and events, information about and links to its growing roster of partners and friends, bios of practitioners of creators engaged with the programme, images (still and moving), texts and sound pieces will appear, regularly updated, on SPARCK’s soon-to-be up-and-running website.
To contact SPARCK’s co-directors, Kadiatou Diallo and Dominique Malaquais, please write to them directly at