FESTAC 2077
FESTAC 2077 (2021-)
FESTAC 2077 is a Lagos based platform for art publications and cultural experiences leading up to 2077. Through installations, workshops, and gatherings, FESTAC 2077 draws on the dynamic legacy of FESTAC 1977 to document new pan-African futures and experimental publishing practices. A partnership between iranti press and A Whitespace Creative Agency (AWCA), the FESTAC 2077 platform activates cultural experiences dedicated to promoting cultural production, community engagement, literacy, capacity building, and creating dynamic, accessible, and innovative art publications.
While its thematic framing is the FESTAC of 1977, the intention of FESTAC 2077 is not to replicate the original festival or its archival traces. Rather, the project references this significant period of Black diasporic history and creative ferment to develop new, expansive strategies for cultural exchange in the present day. Through writing and repetition, the programme continues to imagine, ideate, and enact the story of FESTAC 2077.
Curator’s Statement
Manifesto ACTS! (2023 - ) marks the charged space between the manifesto as a literary object and the manifesto as a material intervention. In this space, where the rhetorical and the discursive intervene in the world of social action, and in turn undergo various processes of reification and remediation, the manifesto produces its own terms of –terms which often exceed the intentions of the document’s authors.
While its popular use might seem anachronistic, recalling bygone periods of artistic and political ferment, the questions posed by the manifesto, and its history, remain potent, and are especially critical today, in a historical moment in which speech acts carry increasingly fraught and more ambiguous political meanings, and in which advances in internet use blur the lines between personal and public speech.
For this project, a question of particular relevance is the question of survival. If the defining attitude of the manifesto is declarative, an attempt to present the authors’ viewpoints in accordance with or in opposition to prevailing norms, in what ways does the manifesto imagine its own persistence? How does it imagine its movement, either toward the realization of the world it affirms or against, and therefore beyond, the world it rejects? In other words, what is survived in and by the manifesto?
Crucial to the question of survival are questions of form: how does the manifesto survive, materially and discursively, after the moment of its production? Responsibility: to and for whom is the manifesto responsible? Risk: what does the manifesto risk in interrogating the conditions of its production? What does it risk in putting its language to work? Intervention: how does the manifesto participate in its reception? How is it marked, catalyzed, or constrained by the social world it enters? What affects and antimonies saturate its afterlives?
In exploring these questions, Manifesto ACTS! initiates projects, experiences, and interactions which take up notions of the public and publicness, authorship and authority, spectacle and speculation, text and intertextuality. The programme is curated by iranti press founder, Maryam Kazeem and writer Joshua-Segun Lean.
Workshops
Manifesto SEEDS
May 2023
FESTAC 2077, began in 2023 with an experiential writing workshop in Lagos, with a notable challenge: How can we brainstorm collectively and approach a hypothetical event? A speculation and a seemingly tangential dream? Over the duration of two weeks, writers, artists, and cultural practitioners were invited to participate in a workshop that focused on writing in and within public space.
During Manifesto Seeds, participants navigated public writing exercises, which asked: How can we mark, preserve, and engage with a rapidly changing Lagos? How can we document and speculate on Lagos in the future?
The workshop took place at three public locations in Lagos: National Public Library Yaba, Eko Atlantic, and the Lagoon.
Publishing ACTS!
July 2024
Publishing ACTS! is a month-long experimental publishing workshop, which explores artistic interventions and translates them into acts of publishing, whereby publishing is expanded beyond traditional forms into alternative material, space, and publics.
The July programme proceeds from the 2023 programme MANIFESTO SEEDS, an exercise of contemplation and gathering in consideration of a potential FESTAC future, alongside increasing diminished public space in Lagos. Publishing ACTS! embarks with archival manifesto traces originating from the twentieth century pan-African festivals. How can these texts be repurposed or expanded? Manipulated? Erased? What do they provide as a sort of source material as we project our desires for our present and future? What do they reveal about the past? How do we even begin to write the world that we want to live in? The workshop considers a series of prompts and various paths to compose a collaborative manifesto for 2077 through alternative publishing practices, which consider publishing as a space for speculation, initiation, and critique.
Referenced by Yoruba Photoplays, which exist between the sonic (oral and aural), literary (written), visual (photographic), and kinetic (performative)–workshop participants employ site specificity as they perform publishing acts through a series of experiments throughout Lagos. Their collaborative attempt explores pluralistic modes of collaboration which question singularity and accord as an end goal. Why should we all simply agree on our desire and vision for the future?
This workshop was made possible by the Goethe Institut Nigeria’s Support + Connect Initiative 2024.
The Future Protest
The Future Protest is an experiment that posits and reflects on how civic engagement can possibly be facilitated. It begins with a banana boat on the Lagos Lagoon, a living archive, holding generational traces of urban expansion that have resulted in the routine disappearance of the city’s shorelines, riverbeds, and ecosystems. Drawing out the relationship between protest and storytelling, The Future Protest tests the potential and efficacy of experimental publishing, artistic research and activism, asking how our waterways serve as a site for speculation and civic expression. In the midst of diminishing public space, The Future Protest creates cyclical interventions and makes public space, which facilitates safe protest, sustainability, and public discourse.
Events
Upcoming Events
To be announced.
Past Events
October 2024
Write, if you please brings together the artistic responses from Manifesto Seeds (2023) and Publishing ACTS! (2024) workshops. It experiments with the logic of codices and ancient methods of knowledge keeping, reimagining how they can be applied presently.
The exhibition title is both open invitation and call to action, urging a view of authorship as a distributed, collective process. The use of language is emphasised as a social practice and cultural intervention, and the act of writing as a public and multivocal one. Writing as a public act considers some of the ways both language and public space become, and have always been, sites of contention, simultaneously revealing oppressive power structures and amplifying marginalized histories and accounts.
Through visual and sonic fragments of the workshops assembled into scenes, Write, if you please invites visitors to reflect on these themes and more importantly to cross the threshold from spectators to active participants. The workshop fragments have been entrusted to visitors by the artists, to continue the work begun in the workshops, and to enact public interventions of their own.
This exhibition was made possible by the Goethe Institut Nigeria’s Support + Connect Initiative 2024.
