Can we compare agro-pastoral pacts coming from West Africa and Norway, and their correlated ecosystems? Can we queer them and build multi-situated knowledge interfaces without reproducing neo-colonial patterns of extraction?

In this workshop, we propose to learn from the experiences and methodologies of the Theatre of the Oppressed company, Kaddu Yaraax, based in Dakar, and their use of forum theater towards mobilization for social change and political action in local communities in West-Africa. The workshop will navigate between visual and performative arts research, practices of cultivation and herding, migration and translation of situated knowledge and pedagogies. Through methods of improvisation, we will invite participants to bring their personal experiences into the workshop. We aim to create a resonance with (agri)cultural, post-colonial and migration politics in Norway, in order to think of collective modes of resistance to climate change in relation to the violence of extractive capitalism and neo-colonial imaginaries.

The workshop, organized by Raphaël Grisey and Levart, is part of his long-term artistic research project Sowing Somankidi Coura, A Generative Archive, created by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré. The research evolves around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized cooperative along the Senegal river founded by a group of former migrant workers and activists in France in 1977 after the Sahel drought of 1973.

How climate changes the properties of the earth?

As a proposal for discussion along the workshop, we would like to suggest some thoughts around agro-pastoral and fallow time ecosystems, practices, imaginaries and cosmologies.

A new word should be find in english to designate fallow land or fallow time. What we see in a fallow land is exactly the opposite of what its name seems to imply: nothing lies fallow in a fallow land : we observe on the contrary the busy work of worms, herbivore cattles, humans, micro-organism and earth, forming complex assemblage, ecosystem and kinship. Fallow land accelerates the production of fertile soil, that can capture carbon properly and enable future cultivations. It is opposed to the wretched earth, exhausted by intensive plowing, fertilizer, herbicides or pesticides. The cicle of the fallow land – the alternance of cultivation and grazing on a piece of land – is at the core of agro-pastoral pacts. After a land has been cultivated for a while, it is let to feed the cattle, and for worms and micro-organisms to digest and enrich the soil. In the agro-pastoral pact, the land, the earth is a common, it enables the association and kinship between multiple modes of living, sedentary and nomadic ones, vegetal and animal, geological and biological. An agro-pastoral pact designed also an alliance of people which have been historically removed from their land and forced to migrate to become work-forces and raw material in the plantations of the colony or in the cities of the empire.

Can we compare agro-pastoral pacts coming from West Africa, in Norway, or elsewhere, and their correlated ecosystems? Can we mix them and build multi-situated knowledge interfaces without reproducing neo-colonial pattern of extractions?

If artistic research is a nurturing process that needs our analytical attention, could we compare to the process of fallow time? What would be the benefits and limitation of such a comparison? If we abstract and conceptualize the notion of fallow time and of agro-pastoral pact as a set of practices for creating and nurturing kinship between different modes of lives, how could it become a tool to accelerate earth reconstitution, secure commons? How to become resilient to productivism, anthropogenic processes that destroy biodiversity, capitalist mode of land property, and to climate change?

Climate change and desertification involves us all into migrations processes. The pastoral and transhumance movements become similar than the one of climate refugees. More shepherd and cattle need to graze closer to water supplies. Access to water has been privatized, the land nearby rivers became ownership of the landlords and the peasants without soil had to flee to the cities. The soil changes properties due to climate change, it needs seeds and situated knowledge coming form elsewhere.