Remembering the Haptic Library – Archive Antenna

We take a moment to reflect on our participation in the 15th edition of the Dakar Biennale, where the Haptic Library unfolded as a liquid laboratory of imagination and radical thinking. As part of Archive Ensemble’s ongoing formation “Publishing Practices”, it sought to encourage interaction with a range of textural forms and modes of thought, uncovering ancestral knowledge, embodied narratives.

Presented at the Ancien Palais de Justice in Dakar in November 2024, the Haptic Library emerged as a living archive, shaped by the voices, and gestures, where memory overflows its margins.

In the wake of histories marked by rupture and resilience, the Haptic Library is a site of remembering—a space where concealed, unloved, and insurgent knowledge resurface and overflow. Drawing inspiration from the word “hapticality,” as proposed by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in The Undercommons, the Haptic Library presents itself as a receptacle for extending “the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you…” It questions the inherent dominance of sight and printed matter by bringing multiple approaches to inscribing and disseminating knowledge into proximity and encouraging interaction with a range of textural forms and modes of thought. Inspired by Christina Sharpe’s wake work and Toni Morrison’s call to remembering through floods of love and imagination, the Haptic Library invites us to navigate the textures of textiles, the prose of plaits, and the syntax of sonics. It questions the colonial foundations of knowledge by reopening forgotten archives, which are not confined to the written word, the finitude of the book, and the conventional idea of the library.

Here, the act of re-membering becomes a way of rewriting and resisting colonial narratives that have severed bonds, suppressed affect, and fractured entire cultures. Holding steadfast to our capacity to commune in the wake of catastrophe, unbowed if they call it riot, protest, or delusion, unlawful only to those who fear the ungovernable force of recollection.

Let us return once more to the Haptic Library, where listening is deep, memory is insurgent, and grounding is an act of defiance. In the contours of touch and echo, we trace the currents of shared resistance, where knowledge refuses erasure and history flows beyond imposed margins.

Artistic Direction of the Biennial: Salimata Diop
Associate curators: Marynet Jeannerod, Cindy Olohou, Kara Blackmore

Curatorial ensemble: Mistura Allison, Kany Ndiaye Sarr, Chiara Figone, Samira Ghoualmia, Kennedy Jones, Salma Kossemtini, Tabara Korka Ndiaye

Books, fabrics, carpets, and baskets will be displayed side by side with the stories of various poets, artists and performers, including: Zineb Achoubie and Lorenzo Sandoval, Navjot Altaf, Marwa Arsanios, Rashida Bumbray, Banji Chona, Diana Ejaita, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Keren Lasme, Elsa M’bala, Jumana Manna, Savanna Morgan, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Katy Léna Ndiaye, Sara Ouhaddou, Lerato Shadi, Kimpavita

Production: Babacar Diouf, Nelson, Mamodou Diallo, Mohamed Dimba, Baba Graff, Ousseynou Baye Fall, Ibou, Pape, Magloire, Ibrahima, Seydou Barry, Seydou Ndiaye

Graphic design: Archive Appendix, Anna Diagne, Ismahane Poussin

Elements of the
Haptic Library

BASKETS

Banji Chona /// Silent Syntax: A Geometric Basket Language Study, 2024

In “Silent Syntax,” the Zambezi River flows through the sounds of the baTonga people and the Ilala Palm, weaving together stories carried along their rhythmic exchanges. The baskets that emerge from within are not merely containers for objects; they hold meaning, intertwining narratives of transition and stasis.

Chona’s research involved dialogues with weaving communities across the continent, centred on the dialogue amongst and between BaTonga and other weaving communities like the Fulani, revealing layers of knowledge related to healing practices. The baskets journey from makers to sellers, embodying not just material exchange but also processes of creation and transformation. The artist’s anthology, interspersed with blackout poetry, strips away superfluous representation, revealing the true significance of these objects. This work serves as an offering of alternative historiographies and present-day narratives, showcasing the basket-weaving techniques of baTonga women. It aims to challenge socio-political and environmental fractures.

CARPETS

Zineb and Lorenzo /// The Book of Threads: Fatiha’s Story, 2023

The Book of Threads is a body of work conceived by Zineb Achoubie and Lorenzo Sandoval. The work explores the symbols and stories inscribed into carpets,utilizing them as a means to script a film.

Installation, carpet 200 x 300 m, two-channel film, double stereo, 10’ Carpet produced in collaboration with cooperative Tifawin Rugs Sound in collaboration with Pedro André

The two-channel film uses a combination of documentary and fiction to tell the story of Fatiha Aitougadir, who worked with the Tifawin Rugs cooperative in Sitti Fadma, in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, to create a carpet shown alongside the films. One screen follows the process of creating the carpet, while the other explores the stories and messages carried by the symbols woven into it, thus engaging poetically with multiple ancestries and temporalities. The Atlas Mountain is a region imbued in the female-transmitted practice of carpet making, and carpets have an extensive presence in people’s lives.

They are repositories of much information encoded in their patterns, colours and motifs. The film’s quest(ion) is how to maintain a certain level of opacity while delving into stories deeply rooted in a place with multiple registers of storytelling.The installation is conceived as a set for interviews and a space of gathering and transmission in which knowledge and narratives can be recorded and shared.

CASSETTES

Elsa M’bala /// Project Ass Niang Collection

During her residency in Dakar, sound artist Elsa M’bala stumbled upon an unexpected treasure while walking in Toubab Diallo. Drawn to a small shop brimming with vinyl records, cassettes, and handcrafted items, she met Ousmane, the passionate music enthusiast behind the space.

M`bala was then introduced to this local collectionneur from Rufisque, which used to be one of the french colonial station and benefited from foreign infrastructures. Ass Niang who has been gathering cassettes of African music for the last 50 years, has herited the cassettes from his father and until recently continued the collection himself. From Congolese rumba, Ghanaian High Life, Senegalese Ballack, Cameroonian Makossa to Arab music as well as comedy specials. The variety of sounds is vast and reflects a sonic treasure depicting African storytelling since the 1960s.

This serendipitous meeting birthed the Project Ass Niang Collection, with Niang agreeing to sell part of his archive to Elsa M’bala. Together, they envision artistic extensions that honor and celebrate this legacy.

CANARIES

Keren Lasme /// Wake work for our great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers and those who came before them and are still present, 2024

Keren Lasme explored ways to reconnect with the wisdom and creative spirit of grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

This journey culminated in ‘Wake work for our great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers, and those who came before them and are still present’, an installation that centers the canari, an earthen vessel used for water, rituals, and medicinal concoctions.

The canari holds more than water; it embodies a shared cultural memory, a symbol of resilience and care. Inspired by Alice Walker’s essay In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1972), She sought to answer Walker’s question: “What did it mean for a Black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time?”

was a point of departure, a roadmap that led the artist to trace her creative lineage starting from her maternal great-grandmother who was a potter, herbalist and medicine woman. This question emerged in Alice Walker’s essay In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1972) as a prompt to uncover the creative spirit of these women who dwelled in time and spaces of subjugation, constraint and affliction. Thus, “Wake work for our great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers and those who came before them and are still present” is an attempt to answer this question. It is a prayer, an altar, an invocation, an act of care and a sacred site of/for remembrance.

It is an invitation to search for and unearth the creative life and genius of our matriarchs, who used materials at their reach to plant their creative dreams, who freed their creative spirit in spaces of enclosure and managed to pass it on to us.

Essential Reading

A profound and harrowing meditation by a descendant of slaves who journeyed to Africa to understand her past. The slave, Saidiya Hartman observes, is a stranger torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. There are no known survivors of Hartman’s lineage, no relatives to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way, and with figures from the past, vividly dramatising the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and American history.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free. These women refused to labour like slaves. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood – all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman deploys both radical scholarship and profound literary intelligence to examine the transformation of intimate life that they instigated. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance.

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of “vision” and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.

Unpayable Debt offers a black feminist reading of the political architecture of the global present. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, in which an African American writer is transported from 1970s Los Angeles to the antebellum South to save the life of the child of a slave-owner who is also her ancestor, the concept of the unpayable debt—a debt someone owes but that is not hers to pay—relates post-Enlightenment versions of ethical and economic value to colonial and racial subjugation. Focusing on the philosophical basis of these renderings of value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes how coloniality and raciality operate in the juridical, ethical, and symbolic systems that facilitate the expropriation of labor and extraction of land essential for the accumulation of Capital.