In this pilot study, black feminist writer, researcher and lecturer Lola Olufemi assembles a glossary telling the origin story of Touki – an ongoing collaborative film project commissioned by BEK, Bergen’s Centre for Electronic Arts. Through keywords rather than a linear account, we learn about the collective not as a fixed and bounded group, but rather as a fluid set of relations. In this poetic and fragmented account, strangers become comrades and makers, feeling out together what it might mean to build a practice that is at once insurgent, tender and playful.

These Keywords is grounded in meditations on blackness and infrastructural violence, the project draws on authors such as Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Marxist thought and experimental West African cinema. The theory comes second, however, translating lived experience and the primordial force of elemental connection. The Touki practice and this text disturb institutional habits of knowledge and authorship, inviting us into a drifting narrative where rocks speak if we will listen, and where water’s depths and flux unsettle memory.

Context

This text is one of the pilot studies of Re-Imagine Europe: New Perspectives for Action. In these contributions we explore and reflect on artistic practices and experimental approaches in the cultural field that can engage and activate audiences and communities to address ecological, social, and political challenges. The pilot studies provide an overview of practices of cultural organisations that can serve as models, recipes, or tools for transformation for current and future generations of cultural workers and artists.

Read the pilot study directly on our website or download the PDF to save for later.