RAW Académie is an experimental and experiential program for the research and study of artistic practice, artistic thought and curatorial practice. It invites a lively reflection on art research, curatorial practice and critical writing. If we see the Académie as a place for transforming our methods, for reflecting on them and for transmitting non-hierarchical knowledge between all program participants, it seems essential to open up involvement to the beneficiaries of this program, so that they can show and share what their practice has become, after their passage through the program.

Therefore, following on from the group show The Educational Web, held at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 2023, RAW Material has seized the moment to take over a space. And rather than demonstrating the RAW method through an exhibition of archives, it is taking this idea a step further and actually occupying the space in an assertive way: by giving a voice to the primary interested parties to address the question of knowledge transmission, and by showing how it can reflect, speak and build from and with the community.

We designed this carte blanche to consist of three parts. The first is a Reading room implemented by Untitled Duo (Yvon Langué & Soukaina Aboulaoula), on the practice of the RAWAcadémie as an entry point for mapping the initiatives that have transformed the continent in terms of artistic and cultural education. The second is a residency led by writer, curator and filmmaker Renée Akitelek Mboya, with the aim of developing a methodology from the Spanish context, in connection with the Afro-diasporic community. It will result in the production of a film and a solo exhibition of her practice. The third iteration is a group show curated by Amina Lawal Agoro on the question of Afro-diasporic identities and communities, with the aim of demonstrating the mechanisms of cooperation that have been put in place between different women artists.

 

May our song be worthy of those who listen

 

The first part of this collaboration began on March 9, 2024 with an opening attended by the program's curators, Untitled duo_Yvon Langué & Soukaina Aboulaoula, Renée Akitelek Mboya & Amina Lawal Agoro, Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy & Delphine Buysse from RAW Material Company team including Marie-Hélène Pereira in her capacity as curatorial advisor. 

May our song be worthy of those who listen takes the shape of a reading room in which we display an interwoven tapestry of collective forms of being, I doing and (un)learning.
The opening conversation was followed by a screening of Ahmed Bouanani's film Mémoire 14* (1971, 25 minutes), followed by a conversation with Ali Essafi about his book Widen the Circle: An Obscure Experimentation in North African Avant-Garde Cinema (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2022).
*Courtesy Touda Bouanani — Les Archives Ahmed Bouanani.

The reading room offers an immersive encounter with RAW Académie over the course of its ten sessions, alongside a curated selection of materials that echo RAW's ethos and perception of knowledge production and its different modes of transmission and dissemination.

Additionally, the reading room serves as a platform for mapping a landscape of the different voices that work with, and around, flexible models of radical artistic pedagogies. In this sense, within the reading room, RAW acts equally as a case study and a narrator that recounts the non-linear journey of education as cultivated over its notion of laboratory and through its network.

The title is borrowed from Ahmed Bouanani's evocation of the storyteller at the beginning of his film Mémoire 14: "Widen the circle may God widen your graves blessed be the poet and the storyteller may our song be worthy of those who listen to us”. Further, it is a direct reference to the Halqa. (which translates to "the circle" in Arabic), an ancient form of storytelling in Morocco where the storyteller or narrator performs in public spaces * in a circular setting.

Beyond a mere storytelling arena, the Halqa is a space for collective movement, learning, archiving and gathering. It thus mirrors the essence encapsulated within the notion of study as employed in The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney: "Study is what you do with other people. It is talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice." 

Drawing upon this, the reading room expands upon the Halqa as a spatial, metaphorical and narrative conduit to create a space where trails of knowledge are continuously in the making.

The exhibition "May our song be worthy of those who listen" includes, Taught to Travel, 2022, a project curated by Moad Musbahi — a serie of short films commissioned to Dakar creatives (Arfan Barro, Diakus et Xelkoom, Moustapha Mballo Dieng, Halimatou Diallo, Mod’boye Diallo) in the framework of RAW residency program in February - March 2022. In collaboration with Harun Farocki Institute (funded by Goethe Institute Visual Art Fund).