CHAPTERS:
AtWork Milan, Italy
Workshop dates: October 17-21st
Exhibition inauguration date: October 23rd
Partner: BASE
Workshop language: English
Conducted by: Simon Njami
Application deadline: September 15th, 2023
AtWork Cali, Colombia
Workshop dates: March 6-10th
Exhibition inauguration date: March 13th
Partner: Kitambo
Workshop language: Spanish
Application deadline: February 17th, 2023
Moleskine Foundation launches a call for young international creative talents to participate in its itinerant educational format AtWork under the umbrella topic: “Who is the stranger in me?”
The Fon and the Bakongo cultures share the same type of divinity: Nana Buluku for the first and Mahungu for the second. For the Bakongo, Mahungu was a two headed creature who was split in two parts and gave birth to a male (Lumba) and a female (Muzita). For the Fon, Nana Buluku created the male and the female from its androgenous nature. This stranger in me should not be confused with somebody coming from outside, like the Jewish dibbouk (a demon that haunts its victim’s spirit) or Sosia, Plautus’ character (the slave with many faces). Instead, it is another part of me. That part that activates actions or reflexions that I don’t totally master and that, at times, can surprise me, as if I had been daydreaming or had been a victim of somnambulism period. Neither it is the German doppelgänger, even if that mythologic character opens up to a reflexion about the duality of human being. In the African vaudou or certain Latin American ceremonies, the trances allow people to reach another part of their personality and to bring out hidden information that they had no consciousness of. It’s a shout that frees this intangible part of their psyche. It is perhaps the same kind of metaphorical shout developed in Albert Camus novel “La chute”, the story of Jean-Baptiste Clamence (from the latin clamens, which means shouting out, in reference to John the Baptist who preached in the desert) who, at a certain period of his life, becomes his own judge. Until the revealing moment where he did not try to save a drowning young woman who will die, the high idea he had of himself seems to him as a huge lie and he starts his own trial. The question behind this short novel, written as a monologue, addresses the « ego » that we think we are and which might be a social construct rather than an assumed reality. Who are we when we say I am? A fiction or a reality? That is the question we are invited to address and that might allow us to follow Socrate’s invitation inscribed on the frontispiece of Delphi’s temple: Know thyself.
