Noor Abuarafeh
Palestine

Directions for an intimate solutions or seems more intimate

Video Installation
2013

Historically the term voyeur was used as a description of anyone who views the intimate lives of others. This term is specifically used regarding reality television and other media which aloow people to view the personal life of others. In today‟s society the concept of voyeurism has evolved, especially in popular culture. The concept behind “reality TV” is to allow unscripted social interaction with limited outside interference or influence.
Showing this video as part of an instillation in a café has to do with the café as a place of watching, as much as cinema but with unscripted scenes. In this experimental video Noor used her personal family archive, and other related belongings, the video deals with the borders of public and private, personal and general, individual and collective.

Folakunle Oshun
Nigeria

Wolof / Jollof

Multimedia Installation

The project explores the popularity and migratory controversy of this culinary dish consists of a huge outdoor art installation of 70 unique three legged cooking pots mounted on wheels; some of which will be used to cook Jollof recipes from across West African nations and Folakunle Oshun went traveling through West African coast, tracing the route and the recipes’ variations that this dish entails by investigating the multilayer socio-local stories of this migrant dish. A journey that will take them to Benin, Togo, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Gambia, and finally Senegal where the original Thiebou Denn recipe is made by the Wolof tribe.

Mohamed Abdelkarim

Dramatic Episodes about Locomotion

Episodes #1 #2
(Christopher Columbus Meets Diego Diaz) and (Ahmed’s Revenge)

The project’s stem from the notion of the terms [alienation and immigration] in geographical and historical context through North Africa [Morocco] and South of Europa [Spain] that established on Voltaire quote [Africa begins at the Pyrenees] that lead me to several questions about the political and cultural boundaries! Through the research, I’m dealing with narrative as a source of information, from the literature and history and the storytelling.
Recently several questions imposed on the dilemma of the identity, culture and its relation to the Western counterpart, at the same time there is new contemporary theses dealing with dismantling Culture, and the death of National treatises, that drives me to search geographically on two places that can reflect certain phases of historical and geographical relation, one of those places is the Republic of Salé: a short-lived state, founded by Moriscos, were subject to mass deportation during the Spanish Inquisition. The Republic's main commercial activities were the piracy during its brief existence in the 17th century.
The starting point of the research is Voltaire’s quote [Africa begins at the Pyrenees] courage me to reexamine the Spanish works of literature that contain African and Arab gesture such as Juan Guitsolo and Frederic Garsia Lorca.

Amado Alfadni

BLACK IVORY

Sound and sculpture Installation

This project addresses Egypt and Sudan’s role in the history of slavery. Egypt has a long history of serving as a slave market and a place of crossing to the international market. Digging into the history of colonial military slavery in Africa, the black ivory horn sculptures in the installation reference both the physical labour of enslaved men who were forced to carry ivory on their journey to Egypt on the 40-day road, and the term used by the British colonial army to refer to enslaved Sudanese soldiers. A voice recording in Shiluk –a dialect spoken in south Sudan– plays within the installation, telling a story inspired by oral memoirs of one of the enslaved Sudanese soldiers who fought in Mexico.
The story is one of only two remaining records I was able to locate that document the lives of 523 minors who were kidnapped from Sudan and sent to Mexico to fight for the French army in the Mexican-French war at the end of the 19th century.

Rogelio López

El Paraíso es de los extraños

El Paraíso es de los extraños se configura como un proyecto abierto en el que, mediante publicaciones, cursos, talleres y exposiciones, se plantea el análisis de la construcción de la imagen del mundo árabe-islámico en Occidente. Así, el objeto de estudio no es tanto el otro como nosotros mismos, pues los procesos de definición de la identidad propia tienen lugar mediante operaciones de establecimiento de oposiciones que exigen la exclusión de aquellos elementos susceptibles de proyectar sombras, de plantear dudas sobre la imagen de su integridad ideal. La idea de Occidente es inconcebible si no en su relación excluyente, su situación exterior, con respecto a Oriente. La cultura dominante en Occidente rehúsa el reconocimiento del peso y la omnipresencia de las aportaciones árabes a su civilización. Se trata de un rechazo consciente y deliberado por parte de las élites.
El objetivo es el análisis del artefacto que ante nuestros ojos aparece como mundo árabe-islámico; de los significados (abiertos y evidentes unos, sutiles y oblicuos otros) a los que sirven de vehículo en un contexto cultural dado; desde dónde se producen esas imágenes y discursos y cómo los medios de comunicación y la industria del espectáculo crean, mantienen y explotan ese estereotipo que nos disponemos a subvertir, mediante una crítica que no rechace las potencialidades irónicas de la parodia y la caricatura, y desvelar los mecanismos de la representación colonial y neocolonialista.

Voyage en Orient Haram

NDOYE DOUTS
Senegal

Train, train Medina

"Un jour, pour construire sa maison, on se met à voler du sable, le sable de la plage. Dans la Medina tout devient pêle-mêle. Les énergies de communication, la convivialité entre habitants sont à la merci du tohu-bohu et de la cohue. Un jour, tout s'effondre. Vivre ensemble dans l'irrespect de la nature et des autres provoque un temps de malheur qui ensevelit tout, efface tout sans laisser de traces."
Train Train Medina propose une belle réflexion sur l'égoïsme de notre civilisation occidentale, soulignée avec force par la qualité de la mise en scène. Pour réaliser ce court métrage d'animation qui se situe dans la lignée des grands contes africains, Mohamadou Ndoye Dout's, artiste peintre de Dakar a utilisé des matériaux naturels, recyclés ou recyclables : du sable, du carton, des branches et du papier journal.