Join us at G.A.S. Lagos for École du Festival, a collaborative and experimental Study Day focused on re-examining and reactivating the cultural, political, and artistic legacies of pan-African festivals. Organized in the framework of G.A.S. Foundation‘s Annotations programme, the Study Day serves as a site for critical dialogue between artists and researchers working on pan-African festivals and interested publics.
The school draws inspiration from Christian Nyampeta’s École du soir (The Evening Academy), a multiform hosting structure consisting of a scriptorium (a place for writing), an exhibition, and public programs concerned with “thinking Africa” historically and in the present, hosting cooperative thinking and mutual action. The framework for the school builds upon Senegalese writer and film director Ousmane Sembène’s “evening school” tradition, which positions the concept of cinema as a ‘night school’ or l’école du soir for collective study. Sembène and Nyampeta’s offerings frame the activation of École du Festival, as a devoted ground for the examination and deliberation of pan-African festival archives, memories and traces, historically and in the present. Informed by the original school’s traditions of orality, sensuality and conviviality, the Study Day offers a likewise space for collective learning and gathering.
Event Details
This event has been segmented into two sessions that require individual RSVPs. If you would like to attend both sessions kindly register for each session separately.
Date: 6th November, 2024
Session One: 1:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Session Two: 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Location: 9b, Hakeem Dickson Drive, off TF Kuboye Road, Oniru, Lagos
Session One
1:00pm - Introduction with lunch appetizers
1:30pm - Annotations as a Method: Curator’s Talk with Maryam Kazeem and Naima Hassan
2:30pm - Scriptorium! A Gathering for Writing on pan-African Festivals with Tosin Adeosun, Rufus Nwoko, Seyi Olusanya and Timilehin Oludare
5:00pm - Break with appetizers
6:00pm - Session ends
---- Registration is now closed ----
This event is free however spaces are limited therefore it is essential to rsvp to secure your spot.
Session Two
6:00pm - Archival Choreographies with Liz Kobusinge and Theophilus Imani
7:30pm - Session ends
---- Registration is now closed ----
This event is free however spaces are limited therefore it is essential to rsvp to secure your spot.
Annotations artists-in-residence Liz Kobusinge. Annotations Programme October 2024. Image courtesy of Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation.
Programme Details
Session One
Annotations as a Method: Curator’s Talk with Maryam Kazeem and Naima Hassan : A curators introduction talk with critical reflections on the harvest of the Annotations programme and its forthcoming publication.
Scriptorium! A Gathering for Writing on pan-African Festivals with Tosin Adeosun, Rufus Nwoko, Seyi Olusanya and Timilehin Oludare: The scriptorium as a space for “writing” conceptualised by the artist and writer Christian Nyampeta focuses on the act of encountering, translating writing and interpreting texts related to African thought and life practices. Presented as a roundtable, the workshop will host invited speakers who will share works-in-progress and reflective interventions themed on FESTAC’77. In response, workshop participants will take part in a collective writing exercise interpreting the offerings through their own positionalities, research practices and geographies.
Writings produced during the scriptorium will be archived in the Annotations publication.
Session Two
Archival Choreographies: Activating the Annotations Shadow Archives with Liz Kobusinge and Theophilus Imani: Hosted by Liz Kobusinge and Theophilus Imani, this session stages a cartographic performance of their archival research and encounters in Lagos and Ibadan. Through experimental spatial strategies, the residents will present their “Annotations Shadow Box,” a mobile archive unit that harvests and activates clandestine, lesser-known histories of twentieth-century pan-African festivals.
Rufus Nwoko, New Culture Studio. Demas Nwoko’s Children of Paradise, New Culture Studio Archive. Ibadan, Nigeria, 2024. Designed by Rose Nordin.
Annotations Residents
Theophilus Imani
Theophilus Imani is a visual researcher based in Verona, Italy who examines the representation of the Black body in diasporic visual culture. His research, mainly focused on the Italian context, is articulated through the exploration of digital and physical archives, paying particular attention to the production of black vernacular images. Adopting a critical gaze, informed by his political identity as a diasporic subject, he proposes new ways of reading known and lesser-known images through the creation of visual rhymes and dialogues between image and text.
Headshot of Theophilus Imani. Image credit of Monica Cardin.
Annotations Residents
Liz Kobusinge
Liz Kobusinge is a community-taught artist based in Kampala, Uganda, who positions the textured possibilities of eco-printing and painting methods on hand-made bark cloth paper as a ritual of remembrance, layering paper, dyes, ink and video to mimic how our skin holds and disperses memory. Kobusinge work has been exhibited with the Njabala Foundation for their annual exhibition at the Makerere University Art Gallery, as part of KLA ART 2021 in Kampala, with the Salooni Collective at Institut National de Formation Artistique et Culturelle in Burkina Faso and the N’GOLA Biennial of Arts and Culture in São Tomé e Príncipe, with 32 Degrees East for their members’ exhibition and with poet Gloria Kiconco for Return to Sender in Kampala.
Headshot of Liz Kobusinge. Image courtesy of Darlyne Komukama.
Contributors
Tosin Adeosun
Tosin Adeosun Is a London-based researcher, curator, and consultant, specialises in the culture, art, and fashion history of the African diaspora. With a Master's degree in Art History and Museum Curating and a Bachelor's degree in Media and Communications from the University of Sussex, she thrives at the intersections of art and culture. Currently serving as the Project & Partnerships Manager for East Africa at Google Arts & Culture, she excels in leading art partnerships, concept ideation, storytelling, and curatorial projects. As the founder and curator of African Style Archive, Tosin is dedicated to documenting African fashion history through archival photographs, footage and ephemera. Passionate about unearthing narratives of Africa and the diaspora, she collaborates with archives, communities, brands, and institutions to curate compelling stories
Tosin Adeosun © Krystal Neuvill.
Rufus Nwoko
New Culture studio began in 1969 with the building of a personal studio for painting, sculpture and a residential villa by Nigerian architect and artist Demas Nwoko. The building was later expanded to include other studio facilities, including Postgraduate teaching for the graduates of arts and theatre and print press. Two generations later, Nwoko’s grandson, Rufus is at the healm of the institution. As a photographer and theatre artist, he uses New Culture Studios’ expansive, open-air theatre to showcase his performances and those of his contemporaries.
Rufus Nwoko (Creative Director, New Culture Studio) © Ibadan Indie Film Awards 2023.
Seyi Olusanya
Seyi Olusanya is a graphic designer based in Lagos. He is the founder of Afrotype, a studio that intends to subvert cliches around African graphic design by creating typefaces grounded in African history and culture. David Udoh and Eyiyemi Adegbite collaborated on the design and drawing work. Tac was produced with Mirko Velimirović, who provided technical, drawing, and font engineering assistance. Tac One is the initial release of a single style, bold weight, sans serif typeface project that is inspired by the wordmark of one of the most significant festivals in Africa's post-colonial history, Festac '77. As a inspired revival, it expands upon the six lowercase letters, single quotes and numeral 7 in the festival's wordmark, and the result is a contemporary font with comprehensive language support for all African languages that are commonly written with the Latin writing system. Tac is the second project from Afrotype.
Seyi Olusanya © Ayo Aietomobi.
Timilehin Oludare Osanyintolu
Timilehin Oludare Osanyintolu (b. 2002) is a multimedia artist and art facilitator based in Lagos, Nigeria. Timilehin has exhibited his work at Boomer Art Gallery (London, 2020), Nomascape project (Chicago, 2020) amongst others. He launched “WETIN DEY COOK”, a curatorial project by Lynhan Balatbat- Helbock at GAS Foundation (Lagos, 2022) as the first artist to cook and share his work in an intimate gathering. His second show in Lagos was a celebration of his charcoal portraits at 16by16, curated by Tushar Hathiramani. He also exhibited works at AWCA (Lagos, 2022, Tribe X (Lagos, 2022), ART-TO-GO (Basel, 2023), foreign objekt publications(Berlin,2023). In 2024 Ala praxis was awarded the ST+ART for Africa residency in which they embarked in a journey to Dar es salaam to explore and examine sand mining and its effects on coastal regions in Dar with an artistic output at the end of the six months residency
Timilehin Oludare Osanyintolu © Jhazboi Studio.
About Annotations
Annotations is the first chapter of the Re:assemblages programme at Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation. It explores major African cultural festivals and their dual nature as historical events and repositories of postcolonial pan-African encounters. Led by curators Naima Hassan and Maryam Kazeem, the project activates experimental approaches towards archival research and publishing by engaging the complex histories of FESMAN, PANAF, Zaire 74, and FESTAC’77
Annotations Curators
Naima Hassan
Naima Hassan is a researcher and curator, who works primarily with archives. Since 2022, she has led the development of the G.A.S. Library and Picton Archive at G.A.S. Foundation Lagos as Associate Curator and Archivist. Under the foundation’s multi-year programme Re:assemblages, she aims to connect the collections to a transnational network of communities, artists, scholars, and institutions. With an interest in building infrastructures for research on African cultural collections, Hassan is a member of TheMuseumsLab's Steering Committee and Nieuwe Instituut's Indian Ocean Working Group.
Maryam Kazeem
Maryam Kazeem is a writer, and the founder of iranti press, a publishing project based in Lagos, which convenes FESTAC 2077: A Speculative Writing Exercise. She has a BA in African Studies from Northwestern University and an MSc in Gender from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the California Institute of the Arts as a Truman Capote Fellow where she also taught courses in Black cultural and performance studies as a Teaching Fellow for the School of Critical Studies. Her creative work makes connections between abstraction, archival research, and the materiality of language and has appeared in platforms including Criterion, Literary Hub, Catapult, Another Gaze, Apogee, and Joyland amongst others. Her writing has been nominated for The Best of the Net, and she is a recipient of a Prince Claus Seed Award (2024).
The Annotations residency and École du Festival Study Day are supported by Outset Contemporary Art Fund.
