Cultural Program - CONVIVIAL CULTURES | XI Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture - SAVVY Contemporary

FOR THE PHOENIX TO FIND ITS FORM IN US: ON RESTITUTION, REPARATIONS, AND REHABILITATION

Abstract

A SAVVY Contemporary project in collaboration with Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, and ifa Gallery Berlin

How does one complicate the current discourse on restitution, which seems to have manoeuvred itself into a cul de sac? The debates centre the notion of return, thereby limiting the rather expansive and layered subject of restitution. The notion of return, as colloquially used, means going back to a particular geo-spatial space. But to return, one must have a sense of a space and time of departure. Which is to say we cannot think of restitution without thinking of the wounds that were inflicted upon dispossession at any given time, as well as the violences that accompany epistemic, material or human deprivation and destruction, as we see in Anglophone Cameroon, in Palestine, in Myanmar or in Colombia. We cannot reduce restitution to the return of objects while the people who are to receive these objects neither have the luxury of breathing, nor the lands on which to plant their seeds, or are deprived of the abode in which they shelter. So, how can we deliberate restitution in a context wherein time and space have not only changed but have become more precarious and the savagery of coloniality has assumed other forms?

With the project FOR THE PHOENIX TO FIND ITS FORM IN US. ON RESTITUTION, REHABILITATION, AND REPARATION, SAVVY Contemporary is dedicating a series of laboratories, Invocations, publications, and exhibitions on the entanglements of the three key subjects restitution, rehabilitation, and reparation as a possibility of going beyond the notion of just return. Together with artists, writers, and other intellectuals and activists we intend to reflect on notions of restoration – not only of the subjects/objects taken away from peoples and particular places, but also to think of a restoration of the peoples and places that have had to exist in a state of cultural and psychological deprivation. This demands of us to think of any form of restoration as a possibility of re-integration, and rehabilitation. Which is to say the possibility of re-accommodating beings once taken away into systems that have experienced both time and spatial shifts.

ARTISTIC DIRECTION  Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (SAVVY Contemporary)
CURATORS  Elena Agudio, Arlette-Louise Ndakoze (SAVVY Contemporary), Nora Razian and Rahul Gudipudi (Jameel Arts Centre), Alya Sebti (ifa Gallery Berlin)

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Biography - Arlette-Louise Ndakoze

As a philosopher, fiction writer, and curator, Arlette-Louise Ndakoze researches on pan-African sciences and their forms of mediation. She focuses on the connection between text and sound – in the broader sense, the one between spiritual-immaterial and physical-material spheres - those spaces of possibility in the making.

As a special attention, A.-L. Ndakoze has been drawing on artistic and intellectual movements - in Rwanda in particular, and across pan-African cultures in general - with research on philosophical disciplines, sonic history, literary scenes, and the link that holds cultures together to this day.

As a member of SAVVY Contemporary, A.-L. Ndakoze co-guides the radio SAVVYZΛΛR, a transposition of SAVVY Contemporary on air, launched in June 2020. In this sonic world of potentialities, forms of pain move to channels of their liberation.