NO HUMANS INVOLVED

Witte de With is pleased to host HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, a multi-disciplinary arts collective made up of 45 artists who have lived and worked together, in various iterations, for the past twenty years. The collective consists of visual artists, writers, poets, composers, academics, filmmakers and performers from around the world who collaborate across disciplines and cities. Projects conceived and created by this transnational collective ultimately function as laboratories for investigation, production and discourse.

Members of the collective recided in Rotterdam for two months to produce new work, including video and sculptural installations, printed matter, sonic scapes and film shorts. Many of these installations include algorithmically produced sounds, piezoelectric material interactions and visual material from social media, which are explored in relation to the body. By pushing the notion of technology in conjunction with socio-political questions into the physical, sensorial and hence affective realm the Collective is invested in aesthetically emphasizing what writer Sylvia Wynter called “sociogenic principle”. A concept that can be understood as a result of processes of social conditioning and culturally prescribed “sense of the self”, drawing from the work of the writer and activist Frantz Fanon.

The exhibition was organized around the central question: “What does it mean to be human in a world which is continually contesting ‘certain’ people’s humanity?” and explored different modes of perception as forms of aesthetic conceptual protest and disobedience to normative orders. The ‘new default’ position, which the collective aimed to initiate, opened up a conversation around the multiplicity of our identities. Is it possible to move outside of aesthetic strategies that art, through ideological and institutional framings, has for a long time been complicit with? Can art subvert and truly free the body outside the peripheries of myth and representation to open up a debate that might lead to an understanding of what it “feels to be human”?

Exhibition Readings

Exhibition readings were offered by experts throughout the summer:
5 June, 2015: Teana Boston-Mammah (Researcher, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences)
3 July, 2015: Samir Bantal (Executive Manager, OMA)

Symposium

The symposium Between Nothingness and Infinity was held on Tuesday 14 July from 6pm.