Sowing Somankidi Coura is a long-term research endeavor by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized cooperative along the Senegal river founded by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977 after the Sahel drought of 1973.
Sowing Somankidi Coura unfolds and generates cine-geographies that reveal the boundaries between the liberation struggles of migrant workers in France, the Pan-African history of the cooperative and potentialities of permaculture.
Through a practice of filmmaking and collective care, Sowing Somankidi Coura, engages in the articulation of narratives of empowerment and peasant alliances. The research navigates the liaisons across partial perspectives; situated knowledges and ecosystems; hetero-temporalities; affinities between soils, plants, animals and irrigation technologies; archives and reservoirs. Deploying diverse modes of image circulation, the work aimed at resisting forces of erosion, determination, national migration management policies, and the patenting of (post)colonial agro-industries.

The workshop will aim to discuss politics of care, of memory and of archive, thinking through possible forms and (collective) practices of story telling. What is the story of a work, of an object, of a (re)search ? What if the story of the making of a work become as important as the work itself ? What implications carry the gesture of hosting a story and to tell it anew ? The takes and the retakes of a story? Which forms of care could become necessary? What kind of pitfalls could come along the way?

Exercise:
The participants can think or bring what could be the story of a thing, the story of your relation to the thing and why you choose it. A discussion on the possible becoming of this “piece” will introduce notions of a relation to a bigger assemblage, to a broader story.