Àsìkò: On the Future of Artistic and Curatorial Pedagogies in Africa

Annotation

Àsìkò is the result of an itinerant annual pedagogical programme for artists and curators initiated by the late curator Bisi Silva, promoting the movement of artistic and curatorial knowledge on the African continent. The first two programmes took place in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2010 and 2012 and from 2013 moved to Accra/Kumasi, Dakar, Maputo, ending in Addis Ababa in 2016. The book documents how its participants and faculty spent five weeks in each city, as well as their interventions into pedagogical models that are based on research-on-the-move and how these methods created interactive social spaces. Visiting, critically discussing and responding to postcolonial public monuments in each city as one of the ways of thinking through what it means to be ‘postcolonial’ is impressively articulated in the book by some of the Àsìkò participants.

Gabi Ngcobo

As a consequence of such a powerful set of dislocations, the eleven artists and three curators created a final project that summarised the radical spirit of Àsìkò. This group exhibition, entitled ’28 days in Maputo’, addressed the city’s multiple textures in experimental mediums and was presented in one of the historical buildings that mark Mozambique’s troubled colonial past: the ‘Fortaleza de Maputo’, a fortress where our lives as creative individuals became forever entangled in a radical, deep learning experiment called Àsìkò.