Dakar, Ban + AWU + Archive

A growing number of Archive’s members are grounded in Dakar. Aspiring to collaborate more continuously with a constellation of practices rooted in the region, Archive has thus decided to have a base in the city. This new space has been made possible by our sister organization Ban Workshop, an independent pottery workshop initiated by Imann Gaye and a collective of artists, potters, and social workers based in Dakar. Ban is a space developing the potential for pottery to be considered as emancipatory practice. Ban is also the home of AWU, a feminist radio that brings together voices of African women addressing topics and issues such as identity, gender, and sexuality from a feminist, queer, anti-colonial, and pan-Africanist perspective. AWU and Archive will run a feminist library where women can meet, read, and exchange stories. The library will be the backdrop for a series of workshops and seminars around forms of publishing.

Wild tongues

Wild tongues* is a recurring space for reflection and dialogue concerned with many kinds of borders – borders between nations, cultures, classes, genders, languages. This long-term research endeavor will stretch across various geographies and temporalities and will manifest itself in multiple forms. While addressing the complexities of the borderlands, of diasporic politics, physical and internal displacement, cultural dislocation and hybridity, production of Otherness, and the violence of border regimes – Wild tongues intend to establish a space to enact and rehearse forms of togetherness, radical care, and conviviality. The project draws from a genealogy of feminist writers, amongst them Gloría Anzaldúa whose work inspired the title, Cherríe Moraga, María Lugones, Chela Sandoval, Mariana Ortega, Emma Pérez. Wild Tongues will be launched in 2021.

* “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” in Gloria Anzaldùa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987.