🔥 Sierra Leonean-Ugandan writer, translator, and policy researcher Yarri Kamara is part of our Artistic Advisory Board for Culturescapes 2025 Sahara! In 2023, Kamara was a finalist for the US National Translation Award for her translation of Monique Ilboudo’s novel So Distant From my Life. That same year, she also co-edited Culturescapes’ anthology Sahara: A thousand paths into the future. Yarri’s essays and poetry have appeared in Africa Is A Country, Lolwe, The Republic, Brittle Paper, Poda Poda Stories, Courrier International, and Welt-Sichten. As a policy researcher, Yarri is a member of UNESCO’s 2005 Convention Expert Facility, providing cultural policy advice for diverse and thriving cultural sectors globally. Yarri lived in Burkina Faso from 2005 to 2022 and has traveled widely in West Africa. She is currently based in Italy.   Yarri Kamara was a member of the Artistic Advisory Board for Culturescapes 2023 Sahara and we are delighted to have her back for the next edition of the festival! 📸 Anne Mimault #culturescapes #culturescapes2025sahara #arts #festival #africa #sahara #saharadesert

✨ We are very pleased to announce Henri-Michel Yéré as the new president of our board! Born in 1978 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Henri-Michel Yéré has lived in Basel since 2003. He is a researcher at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel and an adjunct lecturer at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). A trained historian, Henri-Michel Yéré has worked on citizenship and nationality questions in the colonial and postcolonial contexts. His more recent work has taken a sociological slant, looking at the relationships between the natural sciences and society at large. He has worked for seven years at the headquarters of Novartis in Basel, occupying various responsibilities in the field of Diversity and Inclusion. As a poet, Henri has published three poetry books and poems and articles in various literary journals. At the last board meeting, he was unanimously elected as president of the Board of Culturescapes. Culturescapes would like to thank Pius Knüssel for his ten years of dedication as president of the board. Thank you very much for your tireless work and for guiding us through these ten exciting years.

🌟 Egyptian curator and cultural manager Reem Allam joined the Artistic Advisory Board for Culturescapes 2025 Sahara. Reem Allam is the Associate Director, Artistic Planning of The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi. She has previously worked for six years as Executive Manager and Artistic Programmer of the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) in Egypt. She has also worked as Head of Cairo Industry Days at the Cairo International Film Festival. Allam holds a UK Master’s Degree in Arts, Festivals, and Cultural Management from QMU Edinburgh, and has been awarded the 2018 Finalist Social Impact Award by British Council's UK Alumni Awards. Over the past years, she has worked in several international festivals, including London's Shubbak Festival and AAF - Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and served as a juror for festivals such as Zürcher Theater Spektakel and Poland's Boska Komedia Festival. We look forward to sharing our experiences and reflections with her and other AAB members! 🫶 More news coming soon 🧾 📸 Photo by Khaled Marzouk #culturescapes2025sahara #culturescapes #decolonization #arts #festival #sahara #egypt #saharadesert

🎉 Congratulations to @mohamed.sleiman.labat for winning the S+T+ARTS Prize Africa 2024! We are very happy to see that the artists present at Culturescapes 2023 are awarded and their work is recognized. The Sahrawi visual artist and writer was awarded for his installation "Sand Gardens", which uses sand as a medium to grow vegetables and herbs in a challenging desert environment using local low-tech accessible materials. “Developing such Sandoponic gardens is primarily to help the Saharwi families access nutritional food locally. The Sahrawi refugees are dependent on food aid whose nutritional value is limited. There are high levels of anemia and malnutrition among the Sahrawi. This artistic intervention responds to a critical problem using local low-tech accessible materials. The Sandoponic gardens save up huge amounts of water.” His film “DESERT PHOSfate” (2023), screened at Culturescapes 2023 Sahara, “weaves through the story of phosphate, exploring the multi-layered narrations about sand particles, plants, and human displacement. The film explores ways of telling about realities, metaphors, and poetics in the desert. It highlights connections between colonial practices, traces of anthropocentric mineral extractions, and the loss of indigenous ways of knowing and telling about the world.” ☝️You can access the video portrait of Mohamed Sleiman Labat in our Digital Space through the link in the bio. 📸 Mohamed Sleiman Labat, photo courtesy of the artist   #culturescapes2023sahara #environment #westernsahara #activism #africa #climatechange #culturescapesmemories

✨ It’s time to present the third member of our Artistic Advisory Board, Fiona Siegenthaler! Dr. Fiona Siegenthaler is an art historian and social anthropologist with a specialization in the interdisciplinary field of contemporary African art, performance and visual culture. Since 2021, she is the Senior Curator at the Africa department of Linden-Museum Stuttgart. She conducted her PhD and postdoctoral research in Johannesburg and Kampala and has lectured for many years at the Institute for Social Anthropology, the Institute of Art History, and the Centre for African Studies in Basel (Switzerland). She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in 2017/18, has engaged in various contemporary art institutions and initiatives in Switzerland and abroad, and has published widely. We are honored to have her with us! 🙌 Stay tuned for more news ☀️ 📸 Fiona Siegenthaler #culturescapes2025sahara #culturescapes #decolonization #arts #anthropology #festival #sahara #saharadesert

🌼This year, we are proud to have a prominent Basel-based member of the Artistic Advisory Board! Elisa da Costa is a communication and media scientist by training who lately tapped into different topics such as transdisciplinarity and co-creation practices, sustainability, Pan-Africanism, decolonization, critical thinking, diversity and inclusion as well as entrepreneurship, and the function of media and communication innovation in those contexts and the linked discourses. Currently, she is a Master’s Student of African Studies at the University of Basel. However, as you see, it is hard to pin down Elisa just in one area. She likes to see and identifies herself as a dynamic and multilayered scientist and professional who works as a writer, researcher, communication professional, and facilitator.  Currently, she promotes her podcast, Blackfluencers, partners with the exhibition project Heritage Concept, and co-curates the program of the tech conference Forum de Tecnologia e educaçao in Luanda, Angola.  Welcome on Board! 👏 🔥 And more news soon ;) 📸 courtesy of Elisa da Costa @e1iva #culturescapes2025sahara #culturescapes #decolonization #decolonize #panafrican #sahara #panafricanism #inclusion #sustainability

🔥 N’Goné Fall, a Senegalese curator and a new member of Culturescapes’ Artistic Advisory Board, has also joined the Documenta 16 Selection Committee. Here comes our double applause and joy! 👏🎉 N’Goné Fall accepted to became one of the six new AAB members to help us prepare Culturescapes 2025 Sahara. She is an independent curator and cultural policies specialist. She was the editorial director of the contemporary African art magazine Revue Noire from 1994 to 2001. She is the author of strategic plans for national and international institutions. She was a professor at the Senghor University, Egypt, lecturer at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, South Africa, and Abdou Moumouni University, Niger. She was the General Commissioner of the Africa2020 Season in France in 2020-21. “I never think of myself as being part of the African diaspora. I’m a Senegalese. Sometimes I’m based in Europe, sometimes I’m based on the [African] continent, sometimes I’m based in South Korea for three months. It is true my references are African. It is extremely important for me to share that African experience, African knowledge with the rest of the world. My role as a curator and as a writer would be to give access to that knowledge, so that while I am curating and writing, you can learn from the African experience… I was raised in a pan-African mindset in my family, and I strongly believe in the power of African cultures,” N’Goné Fall said in an interview with New Frame. 👂More news on the new Artistic Advisory Board to come! 📸 DR / Institut français @panafricandkr @documentainstitut #culturescapes #culturescapes2025sahara #arts #festival #panafrican #africa #sahara #saharadesert

☀️ Climate change is everyone’s business: you can be young or old, living in a developed or developing country, you can be white, Black, or any color of the rainbow. Climate change does not discriminate. I’m on the frontline of the climate fight because I was born an activist. And because I come from a community that lives and depends on nature. These are the words of Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim @hindououmar, a Chadian environmental activist with a unique perspective. Hindou, a Mbororo woman, is a member of an Indigenous nomadic Mbororo People within the wider Fulani People. She is the founder of the Association of Peul Women and Autochthonous Peoples of Chad (AFPAT), a group that actively participates in international climate and biodiversity negotiations. Last year, speaking to the #culturescapes Artistic Advisory Board member Yarri Kamara, she said: “I think women are the masters of the environment. They are knowledgeable about the details, the knowledge that we tend to neglect. When I do the participatory mapping, I am struck by how men give you the bigger reference points. They know where the rivers are, where the sacred forests are, where the mountains are. But when you ask the women, they will tell you exactly from where they collect food and water during droughts, where they shelter their children during a flood, they know which kind of medicinal plant can heal a specific illness. Women are also the ones who transmit knowledge to the generations, just through talking with their own children. That’s how I learned from my grandmother: “Do you know this plant?,” she would ask. “No, I don’t,” I would reply. “It maybe looks the same as this other one, but the difference is ABCD and you can use it for this, for that.” It is just a chat, but at the same time you are also learning knowledge that can be helpful for your entire life”. ☝🏼Read the full interview via link in the bio. 📸 Salma Khalil, courtesy of Terre Indigène. #environment #climatechange #climatejustice #africa #indigenous #activism #culturescapes2023sahara #culturescapesmemories

🍅 The tomatoes are back! Future Farms by Egyptian artist Yasmine El Meleegy, which was a part of #culturescapes2023sahara in collaboration with For, is back in Basel for Art Basel week. This sculptural installation presented by Gypsum and For is open until Sunday at Basel Social Club in the neighborhood of Bruderholz. Future Farms, which is composed of ten fiberglass sculptures of oversized tomatoes, references so-called future projects, such as Saharan plantations growing organic food in the middle of the desert and drawing groundwater that is lacking elsewhere. @basel.social.club #basel #artbasel #tomato #farming #futurefarming #sculptures

☀️ Summer is approaching, and Europe is entering the season of interchanging floods and heat waves. Basel, #culturescapes’ hometown, has just experienced the Rhein’s high water. 🌳 Maybe it’s a good time to think about our connection to nature and how we treat it. During #culturescapes2021amazonia, we published an eye-opening text by the prominent Brazilian Indigenous leader and thinker Ailton Krenak. 
“At a certain moment in history, the “civilized place” of humans conceived the idea of nature; it needed to name that which had no name. Thus, nature is an invention of culture; it is the creation of culture and not something that comes before culture. And this had a huge utilitarian impact! “I separate myself from nature, and now I can dominate it.” This notion must have arrived with the very idea of science. Science as a form of controlling nature, which comes to be treated as an organism that you can manipulate. And this is scandalous,” he writes. 🔖 Bookmark this inspirational summer reading! Link in the bio ☝️ 📸 Ailton Krenak © Miguel Aun #summer #summerreading #climatechange #nature #amazon #amazonas #amazonia #culturescapesmemories

An idea born during #culturescapes2019poland just came back to Switzerland as an exhibition! Isn’t it fantastic? 🤩 Back in 2019, Polish artist @dianalelonek had an exhibition and a residency with #culturescapes. She dedicated this time to the research of slowly disappearing Swiss Alpine glaciers. 🗻 Together with Basel-based sound artist @denim.szram, they started to work on a video and sound installation. It was shown for the first time in @kunsthallebasel Bar during Culturescapes 2019 Poland. Last week, their “Melting Gallery,” an immersive sound installation, and “Solarstalgia,” an art installation on fabric tarpaulins that have covered the tongue of the Rhone Glacier, opened at @gletschergarten Lucern. On view until September 2024. The special exhibition is part of the Switzerland-wide art project «Look how the glacier is disappearing» art_forglaciers. Bravo, Diana and Denim! 🎉 Photos: Gletschergarten Luzern #artforglaciers #glaciers #apls #exhibition #regarderleglaciersenaller #artexhibition #kunstausstellung

Jurriaan Cooiman was elected to the Board of Directors of the @europeanfestivalsassociation 👏 We are proud and happy! 🎉 During the three-days Arts Festivals Summit in Usedom, over 200 delegates from over 40 countries discussed issues of care, awareness, and connectivity in working of arts festivals around the world. The new Board was elected at the General Assembly to guide and support EFA. Now the work begins 😉 #culturescapes #artsfestival #care #awareness