The highlight for me was the experience of exchange and collaboration with artists from Senegal, Egypt and other countries. I did 4 performance pieces, 3 of which were collaborations with other foreign African artists. One of these video pieces is now to be shown in the up and coming Transcape Biennale in Cape Town (March 2007). This epitomizes the success of such exchanges; due to the generous funding I received from Art Moves Africa. The experience has generated energy and creativity for me that has an intense effect…this for me is the lesson in it: that we can learn and feed from one another; that our very differences become the genesis of a unified creativity. The main difficulty was the lack of funding for artistic materials. We each received a very minimal amount of money to purchase materials, which inevitably altered the initial concept or art proposal. The challenge in terms of the exhibition itself was the venue, in that it occurred under a baobab tree. This definitely altered my original idea of doing a response-video piece to the one that I took to Senegal. For these reasons I did a sculptural, installational piece, made out of cast wax. As mentioned above, one of the collaborative works will be showcased at the Transcape Biennale 2007 (Cape Town) whilst a subsequent collaborative work will be exhibited in Egypt later during the year. I was, however, unable to do my initial proposal (with dancers and cardiac rhythms), but am hoping to still manage that later in 2007. Throughout this workshop & exhibition however, I was able to make good contacts for future endeavors
Grant Year : 2006
Profile :
Gender :
Mobility project
to be part of the « Cent livre – Objets pour Senghor » project, in Senegal, and to attend workshops. “One of [the project] aims was to create 100 objects for the proposed Senghor Museum, as well as to encourage exchange and collaborations between African artists from the North and South.
Session
Type of Project
Departure : Cape Town –South Africa
Destination : Dakar – Senegal (West Africa)