Shores of Sahara-Sahel: Waves, Forms, Futures

“For centuries,” Benaouda Lebdai notes, “the Sahara was a space of human and cultural transhumance.” Neither uncrossable nor empty, as it is often narrated, this prismatic region—a vast desert space of dunes, volcanic mountains, salt flats and rocky plateaus, village oases, and prehistoric seabeds—was long a site of social and artistic transfer and epistemological exchange, before being cast into a colonial system by Europe, and turned into a racialized border, shore to shore. Ibrahima Baba Kaké himself once wrote: “Those who thus separate Africa into two different entities make a historical nonsense. The desert must once again become a catalyst… Restoring relations initiated by the ancestors, stopped by the colonial system, is a necessity.” Under the sign of this necessity, and in the deep shadow of a changing climate that is violently disrupting the Sahara’s disparate ecologies, the autumn symposium of Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW was devoted to the artistic and cultural productions, lines of political and aesthetic thought, and epistemologies of the Sahara, and the accompanying Sahel. Titled Shores of Sahara-Sahel: Waves, Forms, Futures, the symposium was held in collaboration with the Culturescapes 2023 Sahara festival, and took place on 11 and 12 October 2023, at Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. Over the course of its two days, the symposium and its artists, thinkers, writers, performers, poets, translators, choreographers, and composers—all come from or engaged with the Sahara-Sahel, or their diasporas—considered some of the ideas, performances, poetics, politics, fictions, materials, and movements that continuously emerged from this kaleidoscopic space.  Shores of Sahara-Sahel: Waves, Forms, Futures is part of Institute Art Gender Nature’s biannual master symposia series that considers artistic practice within its entanglements with gender, coloniality, language, and ecology. Among the artist talks and presentations, Shores of Sahara-Sahel also included a book launch of Sahara: A Thousand Paths Into the Future (Sternberg Press, 2023), the Culturescapes 2023 Sahara publication edited by Kateryna Botanova, Yarri Kamara, and Quinn Latimer. A closing performance by Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT) took place in der TANK, on 12 October 2023.  This symposium was dedicated to the memory of artist Lin May Saeed.  With contributions by Phoenix Atala, Kateryna Botanova, Binta Diaw, Adji Dieye, Onome Ekeh, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT), Yarri Kamara, Benaouda Lebdai, Rania Mamoun, Yara Mekawei, Kettly Noël, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, and Mohamed Sleiman Labat. Moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. All the recordings are available here.