Martina Angelotti Matteo Lucchetti Judith Wielander

2024

Publisher

Nero Editions

Contributors

Projects by:
Maria Theresa Alves – Art Labor – Kader Attia – Richard Bell – Black Quantum Futurism – Brave New Alps – Tania Bruguera – Giuseppe Campuzano – Beatrice Catanzaro and Fatima Kadumy – Luke Ching – Chto Delat – Cooking Sections – Luigi Coppola – Radha D’Souza R and Jonas Staal – DAAR Decolonising Architecture – Ntone Edjabe – Forensic Architecture – Futurefarmers – Maria Galindo – Myvillages – Daniel Godinez Nivon – Nan Goldin – Raphael Grisey and Bouba Touré – Helena Producciones – Sandi Hilal – Kim Hou – Adelita Husni Bey – Emily Jacir – Karrabing Film Collective – Ibrahim Mahama – Zacharias Kunuk – Wu Mali – Renzo Martens – Marisa Morán Jahn – Zanele Muholi – Jesus Bubu Negrón – Otobong Nkanga – Seppe Nobels – Nico Dockx – Ahmet Öğüt – Jasmeen Patheja – Narawan Kyo Pathomvat – Sahar Qawasmi and Nida Sinnokrot – Tabita Rezaire – Robida Collective – Rojava Film Commune – ruangrupa – Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski – Dread Scott – Superflex – Nadya Tolokonnikova – Trampoline House – Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas – Éric Van Hove

Texts by:
Zoe Butt – Néstor García Canclini – Emanuele Coccia – Adam Greenfield – Helon Habila – Colum McCann – Rachel O’Reilly – Ai-jen Poo – Alejandra Sarria – Pelin Tan – Anna Tsing

Assemblies with:
Maria Theresa Alves – Kader Attia – Tania Bruguera – Beatrice Catanzaro – Luigi Coppola – Radha D’Souza R – Daniel Godínez Nivón – Bianca Enzelbaumer – Sandi Hilal – Emily Jacir – Tone Olaf Nielsen – Vida Rucli – Alessandro Petti – Farid Rakun – Dread Scott – Aljaž Škrlep – Jonas Staal – Gediminas Urbonas – Nomeda Urbonas

Short stories by:
Ubah Cristina Ali Farah – Maddalena Fingerle – Wissal Houbabi – Beatrice Salvioni – Igiaba Scego – Nadeesha Uyangoda

Visible: Art As Policies for Care – Socially Engaged Art (2010—ongoing) is a seminal publication that explores the transformative potential of socially engaged art practices. This concept book is the culmination of over a decade of curatorial research by Martina Angelotti, Matteo Lucchetti, and Judith Wielander, focusing on the relationship between art and the public sphere. It presents a new scene of artistic practices that interpret the dematerialization of art into transformative cultural and care policies, addressing the climatic, social, and political urgencies of our times.

The book is imagined as a polyphonic publication, featuring voices from artists, contemporary literature authors, journalists, activists, politicians, and community organizers. These diverse contributors provide a comprehensive understanding of the projects’ impact and their potential to inspire new policies of care within society. By narrating a transnational movement, the book highlights the interconnectedness of artists and key figures who are shaping the discourse on socially engaged art.

In addition to project insights from the artists and outlooks by experts from other fields, the book includes a series of ‘assemblies’ where practitioners discuss their reflections and perspectives, creating a shared space for collective learning. These dialogues are complemented by a comprehensive chronology of Visible’s assemblies and temporary parliaments, and an epilogue by philosopher Emanuele Coccia on the possible future evolution of socially engaged art.

By weaving together fiction and reality, historical context, and contemporary analysis, Visible: Art As Policies for Care offers a profound exploration of the role of art in addressing urgent societal challenges and envisioning a more caring and just future.

 

Interview for VISIBLE 2024

Bouba Touré and Raphaël Grisey – Somankidi Coura

 

In 1965, at the age of seventeen, Bouba Touré left the newly founded republic of Mali and traveled to the capital of its former colonizer, France, to work in the car industry. A decade later, seeking an alternative to the harsh conditions and exploitation he experienced, he and fellow members of the Cultural Association of African Workers in France began farming in the Haute-Marne region. In 1977, Touré and a group of former activist migrant workers established Somankidi Coura, an agricultural cooperative on the banks of the Senegal River in Mali. Their mission was to create a sustainable model of self-sufficient subsistence farming. Today, the cooperative’s village, inhabited by around three hundred people, stands as a remarkable model of agricultural resistance fostering healthy, self-organized rural communities.

 

« Raphaël Grisey: The founders of Somankidi Coura first met in Paris in the late 1960s as part of the Cultural Association of African Workers in France, which supported liberation struggles in Africa and the migrant workers movement. During the famines in the Sahel region in the early 1970s, the group started to think of decolonial economic and agricultural practices that could counterbalance forced migration, exploitation, and hunger. After learning farming skills in France, the group returned to Mali, near the city of Kayes on the Senegal River, to found their cooperative. Tackling the fatalism of the rural exodus and the exploitation of migrant workers, they aimed to envision new forms of multi-crop farming away from the agribusiness system of cash-crop monocultures for export.

In the 1970s, Bouba Touré, a cofounder of the cooperative, began photographing the lives and struggles of the migrant workers in France and then in Somankidi Coura. In 2006, I started collaborating with Touré, first making films and later unfolding the ongoing research series Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive around the gardens of the cooperative and the archives of Touré and others, through a practice of filmmaking, archiving, publishing, workshops, exhibition-making, and theater within different rural, migrant, student, and artistic communities in Mali, France, and Senegal, as well as various other places, activating, modulating, and translating into different languages the stories of Somankidi Coura.

From a pedagogical and artistic micro-history approach, the project expanded into the understanding, the unfolding, and the montage of a broader cine-geography that has been at play since the late 1960s, telling manifold stories of migrant worker and farmer movements and practices of decolonial ecologies. Our collaboration deeply impacted both our practices. It also challenged notions of authorship, time, and geographies for, I suppose, everyone involved.

Somankidi Coura grew into a village. It became known in the region and in the Malian diaspora in France because of its pedagogical aspect. In the early 1980s, it helped found the Regional Union of Agricultural Cooperatives in Kayes. In 1982, the women’s association of Somankidi Coura emerged, whose members fought for land restitution. Some co-op members had a prominent role in founding Radio Rurale Kayes in 1986, “a radio for peasants and by peasants,” broadcasting in four languages. Since the 2000s, Somankidi Coura breeds and sells its own peasant seeds, such as that of the Violet de Galmi onion. Many co-op members have been active in peasants’ rights and food sovereignty in the Sahel region through the movement La Via Campesina.

Touré became the main ambassador, storyteller, and documentarian of the co-op for the diaspora of the Senegal River. Since 2008, Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive has expanded the work and pedagogies initiated by Touré, opening it up to different fields and collaborations. Our work aims to bring a historical perspective to social, decolonial, and ecological movements from a radical migrant tradition that are forgotten due to precarity, racism, segregation, and ignorance, or unspoken due to translation difficulties, geographical gaps, and traumas.

Our practice and pedagogies also aimed to reach local art and activist communities in rural or urban contexts, in Europe or in Africa: first, to situate the stories of the co-op within a broader nonauthoritarian Pan-African decolonial and liberation movement of farmer and migrant-worker communities around the globe and across different periods of time, and second, to question the politics and relation to the land within our own context.

The cooperative has grown. Some of the kids are taking the plots of their parents, others left the village to study, some are in Bamako or Dakar, in Algeria or in Europe, some died in the Mediterranean Sea. The women association of Somankidi Coura just installed a solar irrigation system for three hectares of land. The next ten years will be challenging—a new generation will take over from the elders and the region’s political development is unforeseeable. I hope the cooperative, union, and communal organizations will fight for agroecological approaches despite climate disruption and the developments of global trade and agribusiness along the river.

After Touré passed away in early 2022, together with his relatives and friends we started to digitize his photographic archive. In April 2023, the physical archive was given to the Departmental Archives of Seine-Saint-Denis outside Paris. We are now working with the staff there to continue the inventory. In parallel, we are organizing an ambulant cinema project to present our last film, Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices, 2022), along the Senegal River. »