NYANSAPO Fest’ – 2022 Edition

Click here for tickets

Nyansapo Fest’ is back!

Join us on July 1st, 2nd and 3rd 2022 for the third edition of our European afrofeminist festival, to imagine ‘the Day after the end of the world’.

Expect a whole line up of round tables, workshops, training sessions and artistic performances, to explore all the possible futures beyond climate, social and political disasters. 3 days of interventions from activists, artists and academics based in Europe, at la Parole Errante (Montreuil) and the CICP (Paris).

And we are very excited to welcome as our international guests this year members of the Senegalese feminist organisation JAMA!.

The festival is open to everyone. Tickets available from June 3rd, free donation from 1 euro.

Detailed programme coming soon.

 

 

Why NYANSAPO? Sounds a bit mysterious to you? We honour the wisdom of our communities through this festival’s name. NYANSAPO is an Adinkra (visual symbols created by the Ashanti of Ghana and the Gyaman of Ivory Coast) which means knot of wisdom, ingenuity, intelligence.

The ability to choose the best way to achieve one’s goal, putting knowledge and experience
to practical purpose.

With a name like that we’re already on the good foot, so sist@s we’re waiting for you – and spread the word!

________________________

General programme


Art exhibition by Thaïs Zaki and Elsa Rakoto throughout the festival

Maximum registration : 2 worshops / pers.

 

 Friday July 1st

– Opening night –

La Parole Errante

You can sign up for workshops during opening night

6pm – Doors open

7-9pm

Dance performance

by lua-KRIS

Opening talk

Let our People go: The War in Ukraine and Black feminists organizing for  Black students.

With Koiki Tokundo – Founder of Black women for Black lives (U.K)  

Tokunbo Koiki was born in London but spent her early formative years in the vibrant city of Lagos, Nigeria. An experience which shaped her taste buds and love of Nigerian cuisine and culture. In February 2022, Tokunbo created a Go Fund Me campaign to support Black people fleeing the siege on Ukraine. This action was pivotal in the creation of Black Women for Black Lives; a grassroots volunteers led organisation that raised £326,000 and supported over 2000 people to safety. Tokunbo has a powerful story, but more importantly, she personally believes that everyone else does too. Through the Tokunbo Chronicles podcast, she combines insightful solo episodes with riveting interviews to share transformational stories that educate, entertain and empower her audience.

 

8.45 pm

Concert

Sophye Soliveau, Singer, Harpiste, choirmaster

 

 9-11pm

Dj set

by Sound Pretas (Portugal)

The main elements of Sound Pretas are party, music, dance and fun, but it’s also about resistance and visibility.

 

Saturday July 2nd

10am-12am 

Workshops & Trainings

– Book Club and writing workshop around The Parabole of the Sower by Octavia Bulter –

workshop by Kiyémis

Kiyémis is an afrofeminist author and poet.

_______

– AfroTrans. For afrocentric trans historiographies –

workshop by Cases Rebelles 

 
Workshop around the book AfroTrans – For afrocentric trans historiographies. Sharing afrotrans historical perspectives and conversation on the issue of approaching Black trans identities from an afrocentric perspective.

Cases Rebelles is an anti-authority Black political collective created in France in 2009. The collective fights against all forms of oppression from an afrocentric, panafrican and revolutionary perspective. The collective has a monthly podcast, interviews, reviews and articles on the cultures and struggles of Black people all around the world. Cases Rebelles has written and published several books (‘100 portraits against a police State’, ‘The Fire that crackles’), directed the documentary ‘To say to Lamine’, translated Assata Shakur’s autobiography from English to French and created in 2020 its own publishing house. AfroTrans, a book collating texts by 14 Black trans people, is their first publication.

 

_______

Afroféminisme 101

by Fania Noel        

This workshop will examine the basics of Afrofeminism in a French context, its genealogy, key elements and political objectives.

A Haitian-born, French Afrofeminist organizer, thinker, and writer. In 2022 she published her second book “Power now. An Afrofeminist Political Horizon” (Editions Cambourakis ) Fania Noel  is a PhD candidate in sociology at The New School for Social Research, her area of research are Africana studies, Black feminism, and capitalism studies. Since 2015 she has been the co-founder and editorial director of the political journal on intersectionality Revue AssiégéEs (Besieged). Former member of the MWASI – Collectif Afroféministe in charge of the political ideology and training, she joined in 2021 Black Feminist Future‘s Board of Directors. She is the creator and publication director of Alaso, a Haitian feminist anthology review edited by the Haitian feminist organization Nègès Mawon.

_______

– Black future: freeing ourselves from the limitations of whiteness to build an afrorevolutionary future –

workshop by the Susu collective

This workshop will describe the way the collective defines its own practice and frees itself from the limitations of the white activist world to build its own agenda, relationship to time, conditions and forms of struggle.

The Susu Collective (Belgium) was created in 2020, after the rise and impact of Covid on Black people around us (loss of income, of undeclared work opportunities, limited benefits or benefits being taken away without valid reasons, homelessness…). With all these converging experiences we wanted to create a mutual aid community network, based on the idea that by sharing resources and information, we could collectively fight the violence we were experiencing individually.

_______

Reimagining the City – Constructing Black Subjecthood

– by Margarida Waco and Alice Grandoit-Šutka  –

For this edition of the Nyansapo Festival, participants are invited to take part in a collective discussion exploring gaze, Black diasporic urbanism, intertextuality, and collective memory. The conversation will be followed by a creative mapping exercise where we will build vocabularies of solidarity through fragments of text and sound. Departing from Katherine McKittrick’s 2021 book ‘Dear Science and Other Stories’, this session explores livingness and relation against the backdrop of colonial violence and antiblackness.

Margarida Waco is an Angolan-born architect currently living in Stockholm, Sweden. With lived experiences from geographies spanning from Angola, D.R. Congo, the Republic of the Congo, France, and Denmark, her work straddles research, publishing, design, and curating. Her ongoing research practice investigates the spatial toolboxes of warfare and militarized landscapes in Angola through the lens of architecture and memory formation. In addition, she previously served as the head of strategic outreach of The Funambulist where she now forms part of the Editorial Advisory Board.

Alice Grandoit-Šutka is a research based designer, publisher, and cultural organizer.
Over the past 15 years Alice has developed an expansive practice that is equal parts experimental, referential, and relational existing at the intersections of the arts, community engagement, education, and urbanism. She is the co-founder and editorial director of Deem Journal a bi-annual print publication exploring design as social practice.

 

______

– Non-linear movements and practices: Afrofuturism, Body, Time and Space –

 by Melissa Rodrigues

In this workshop we will travel through different Afrofuturist artistic, thought and aesthetic references to collectively speculate on impossibilities and reclaim ancestral technologies of  knowledge  that enable us to reconnect and recognize the past in order to act on the future.

Melissa, was born in Cabo Verde and lives in Lisbon/Porto, Portugal.
She is a performer, visual artist, art-educator, curator and black feminist anti-racism activist.
She is part of UNA – União Negra das Artes, association for Black Artists in Portugal.

_______

12.30- 5pm `

Comité Adama Protest

_______

2 pm- 4.30pm

– Conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs  –

Online

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings.  Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice.  Her poetic work in response to the needs of her cherished communities has held space for multitudes in mourning and movement.  Alexis’s co-edited volume Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016) has shifted the conversation on mothering, parenting and queer transformation.  Alexis has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works published by Duke University Press (Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity in 2016, M Archive: After the End of the World  in 2018 and Dub: Finding Ceremony, 2020.)  Unlike most academic texts, Alexis’s work has inspired artists across form to create dance works, installation work, paintings, processionals, divination practices, operas, quilts and more.
Alexis is the founder of Brilliance Remastered, an online network and series of retreats and online intensives serving community accountable intellectuals and artists in the legacies of Audre Lorde’s profound statement in “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” that the preceding statement is “only threatening to those…who still think of the master’s house as their only source of support.”  Through retreats on ancestor accountable intellectual practice, and online courses on topics from anger as a resource to transnational intellectual solidarity Alexis and her Brilliance Remastered collaborators have nurtured a community of thinkers and artists grounded in the resources that normative institutions ignore.

_______

Plenary

La Parole Errante

 

6pm

– Children’s show : Singing our victories! –

by Ana Laura Nascimento

7- 8pm

Discussion

Understanding the links between techno-capitalism and ecocide 

Speaker: Peggy Pierrot

Peggy Pierrot lives and works in Brussels. She works mainly with different associations and educational or research structures. Her favourite tools are the humanities and free software. As there are « deep links between gesture and speech, between expressible thought and the creative activity of the hand « 1, she is currently working at the Ecole de Recherche Graphique (ERG) both as a technical and logistical assistant and as a teacher in Media and Communication Theory. She also teaches in the master’s programme Narratives and Experimentation – Speculative Narrative. She gives lectures and workshops on Afro-Atlantic cultures and literatures, science fiction, media and technology and has an active radio practice.

8 p.m.

Theatrical reading of « La Débrouillardise pimpante »

by Sharone Omankoy

by Kaïnana Ramadani and Lauryne Lopes, staged by Azani V. Ebengou, compagnie les Pleureuses de feu (The Fire Weepers Company)

« After every sentimental breakup, my ritual is always the same. In order to bandage the wounds of the burning love story, I exorcize my sadness by listening to blues, cold wave, disco, and of course, a good amount of dirty rap music.”
 Who has never had a broken heart?

Sharone Omankoy, founder and ex-member of Mwasi, Congolese big sister and self-proclaimed heterodissident, talks about her broken heart in this vibrant essay, from the volume Nos Amours radicales (Our Radical Loves, 2021). Actors will tell us her story of looking for love, happiness and balance.

 

Sunday July 3rd

 

11h-1pm 

Worshop

CICP

Kemetic Yoga        

by ABYSMO YOGA

An historical presentation of Kemetic yoga, and the community issues this practice can answer to or address.
We start with an exchange to define our needs and desires.
The Kemetic yoga session is composed of several sets of movements combined with breathing and mindfulness exercises, and ends with a relaxation exercise.
There will be accessories available to adapt the different positions to everyone’s abilities.

Trained by the founder of Kemetic yoga, Babe Yirser Ra Hotep, I then created the collective ‘Kemetic yoga Marseille’ to share and spread knowledge on african yoga. After practicing yoga daily for a dozen years, I then was trained in hatha yoga in 2019, reviewing the fundamentals: philosophy, anatomy, posture, alignment and ayurveda.

 

1.30-3.30pm

Workshops & Trainings

CICP

_______

– Afrofeminist position against prison –

Mwasi Police/Justice Commission

This workshop will analyse how the police, justice and prison are tools of control of black populations, through a feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist approach
Mwasi Police, Prison and Justice Commission: Mwasi positions itself as anticarceral, i.e. for the abolition of prisons in all their forms, including administrative detention centres. We also strongly condemn all forms of police violence.  However, we are aware that the police, the justice system and the prison do not yet have permanent alternatives, and we therefore support all Black people who have been victims of violence or abuse, even if this means going through the justice and prison system. The justice commission aims to organise the involvement of the collective around these themes in accordance with the annual objectives. This can take the form of drafting awareness-raising materials, organising workshops, participating in festivals, organising events, but also internal training.

_______

Haitian Futurity

by Shanna Jean-Baptiste       

 
In this workshop we will explore Black futurity grounded in Haitian history and Vodou mythology. We will situate our discussion in larger articulations of Black futurity in the Francophone world and the Anglophone world.

Shanna Jean-Baptiste is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of French at Rutgers University. She earned a joint PhD in French and African American Studies from Yale University in 2020. Her research and teaching interests include Francophone West African and Caribbean literatures, particularly Haitian literature; identity formation and gender politics; visual art and music; and Afrofuturist aesthetics in the Francophone world. She is currently working on two book manuscripts: the first one charts a literary history of national belonging and unbelonging and traces a genealogy of anticolonial and anti-imperial discourses in nineteenth-century Haitian literature and history; the second one looks at articulations of futurity and Afrofuturism in the Francophone world.

_______

A Window into Black Feminisms in Portugal

by Femafro

This training will focus on a history of Black feminisms in Portugal, looking back at the genealogy and construction of struggles.

Femafro – Associação de Mulheres Negras, Africanas e Afrodescendentes em Portugal is an    Afrofeminist Portuguese Collective that aims to fight racism and all forms of oppression. We use Black Feminism as a political tool to fight racism, colonialism, capitalism  and patriarchy. We have been involved in the recent years in various fights regarding police brutality, gender equality through protests or other forms of action.

_______

Building feminist mobilisations against Françafrique

by Collectif Jama – Français

Participatory workshop based on feminist perspectives: discourses, images, artworks

Collectif Jama is a Senegalese feminist organisation that aims to contribute to the fight against inequalities in the rights and treatment of women and vulnerable people, by mobilising a diversity of actors and providing spaces for vulnerable people.

_______

The Global Black Victory Lab – Building a Global Black Feminist Solidarity Movement

by Matters of the Earth (U.K), Blackbird( U.S) and MWASI

Matters of the Earth, Blackbird and MWASI began the GBV Lab in 2019, building upon previous years of international solidarity work together.

The aims for our project are to connect local, national, and regional Black liberation struggles throughout Europe and the US to share ideas, best practices, build infrastructure and secure other resources to build – and strengthen our individual and collective movements. We seek to understand what conditions are necessary to build, in this current political time, sustainable solidarity and a shared framework for 21st-century Pan-Africanism politics and practice. The GBV Lab has the potential to bring together movements from across the diaspora and the continent with a vision to build a Global Black political identity, understand the lessons of the past, whilst innovating the models of the future (such as the European Afrofem Tour).

2023 will be our 4th year of GBV Lab collective visioning, and we invite you to workshop with us and explore what could come next for Pan African Femisnist organizing.

_______

Closing evening 

La Parole Errante

5pm – Doors open

6pm

– Panel –

Beyond liberal democracy, envision the day after the end of the world

with  Collectif Susu (Belgique),  Femafro – Associação de Mulheres Negras, Africanas e Afrodescendentes (Portugal), Jama (Sénégal), Matter of the Earth ( United Kingdom), Mwasi-Collectif (France)

 

8pm 

– Theatrical performance –

À nos humanités révoltées

Text by kiyemis – performed by Marie-Julie Chalu and Marina Monmirel

À nos humanités révoltées is a political-poetic performance created and performed by Marie-Julie Chalu and Marina Monmirel based on the eponymous collection by the Afrofeminist poetess Kiyémis.  

9pm

Closing evening