Museum of Impossible Forms’ current program and research framework a sea cannot exist without waves(2021–) is dedicated to new internationalisms and transnational feminist methodologies, deconstructing the legacies of coloniality in order to imagine and create socio-ecological futures based on care and reciprocity. M{if}’s present programmatic direction focuses on amplifying diasporic knowledge(s), translocal experiences, and epistemic plurality as necessary conditions for our collective wellbeing. The unfolding exhibition for Titanik and plant seeds for a different way of living* presents a glimpse of some of the artists and art collectives engaging with M{if}’s research streams, developing moments of study, to dream, develop praxes and poetics that may nurture uncolonized cognitive territories. The artists presented engage with militant methods and context-based learnings to quest social and environmental transformations, with art as a spear of political engagement and praxis within the struggles for justice.
* Excerpt from Robin DG Kelly, quoted in Uhuru Phalafala, Home Is Where The Music Is, Chimurenga, 2021: “creating a world of pleasure, not just to escape everyday brutalities of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, but to build a community, establish fellowship, play and laugh and plant seeds for a different way of living.”
Bios:
Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in the fictional aspects of the documentary film and the politics and poetics inherent to moving image. Since 2011, César has been looking into the imaginaries of the Guinea-Bissau’s Liberation Movement and its cognitive potencies, developing that research into the ongoing collective project “Luta ca caba inda”. The resulting body of work comprises 16 mm films, digital archives, videos, seminars, screenings, publications, ongoing collaborations with artists, theorists and activists.
César’s genre bending work bridges contemporary and historical discourses in her film and video work, as well as in her writing and publications. She is particularly interested in militant cinema and the political dimension of the moving image and the technologies used. She co-founded the Mediateca Onshore, an archival project and a place of learning with ancestors, nature and people in Guinea Bissau. She is Professor of Film and Video at Merz Academy. César lives and works in Berlin.
Chimurenga, a pan African platform of writing, art and politics founded by Ntone Edjabe in 2002. Drawing together a myriad voices from across Africa and the diaspora, Chimurenga takes many forms operating as an innovative platform for free ideas and political reflection about Africa by Africans. Outputs include a journal of culture, art and politics of the same name (Chimurenga Magazine); a quarterly broadsheet called The Chronic; the Chimurenga Library – an ongoing invention into knowledge production and the archive that seeks to re-imagine the library; the African Cities Reader – a biennial publication of urban life, Africa-style; and the Pan African Space Station (PASS) – an online radio station and pop-up studio.
The aim of these activities is not just to produce new knowledge, but rather to express the intensities of our world, to capture those forces and to take action. This has required a stretching of the boundaries, for unless we push form and content beyond what exists, then we merely reproduce the original form – the colonized form, if you will. It requires not only a new set of questions, but its own set of tools; new practices and methodologies that allow us to engage the lines of flight, of fragility, the precariousness, as well as joy, creativity and beauty that defines contemporary African life. As Fela puts it, simply: who no know go know.
Binta Diaw is an artist who lives and works in Milan, Italy. Diaw graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and the École Supérieure d’Art et Design- Grenoble, in Grenoble. Often declined in the form of installations of various sizes, Binta Diaw’s plastic research is part of a philosophical reflection on the social phenomena that define our contemporary world, such as migration, the notion of belonging or the question of identity. By fueling her research through contributions on intersectionality and feminism, Binta Diaw takes us into the exploration of multiple levels of identity; hers as a black woman in a Europeanized world, ours and that of a continuous crossroads of histories and geographies.
Binta Diaw’s work has been exhibited in Les Filons Géologiques, Palazzo Accursio (Bologna, 2021); Museo Novecento (Firenze, 2021); Dïà s p o r a, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, (Abidjan, 2021); School of Water-Mediterranea, Young Artists Biennale (San Marino, 2021); I have this memory, it is not my own, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury (Dakar, 2020); Waves Between Us, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation (Guarene, 2020); Nero Sangue, MAGA Museum (Gallarate, 2020); In Search of Our Ancestor’s Garden (Milan, 2020); Soil is an Inscribed Body, Savvy Contemporary (Berlin, 2019).
Red Forest is a collective that grounds together research, art, political imagination, and social actions thriving for transformative justice and ecological reparations. In 2021 they initiated a pan-continental research focusing on the intersections between contemporary extractivism and datification processes. Red Forest assembles and organises their work with infrastructures of collective reciprocity and interdependency as actual potentiality. Their research contributes to the theoretical framework of Energetic Materialism to conceptualise urgent cultural and social processes in the defence of life and the construction of pluriversal futures in dignified flux. Red Forest is mobilized by David Muñoz Alcántara, Diana McCarty, Mijke van der Drift and Oleksiy Radynski, after their collective practises collided during a 2019-2020 BAK Fellowship in Utrecht; and started the Energetic Materialism Laboratory as Kone Fellows 2021.
Red Forest unfolds as a growing constellation of artists, activists, researchers, media producers, filmmakers,philosophers, educators and time travellers making interdisciplinary projects. They are currently the Artistic Directors for the German Pavilion at the 23rd Triennale di Milano, 2022, commissioned by Goethe Institute.
About Museum of Impossible Forms
Museum of Impossible Forms – M{if} is a cultural center located in Kontula, East Helsinki, and the coming together of communities of art and cultural workers who believe in the need for building anticolonial, antipatriarchal, and non-fascist commitments and futures. Giovanna Esposito Yussif is M{if}’s Artistic Director since 2021.
Opening its doors in 2017 M{if} has unfolded as a dynamically open space that puts into practice decolonial, queer and intersectional feminist values; as a heterogeneous platform to engage with experimental, marginal, and migrant forms of expression; and as a laboratory for experiences, critical thought, and radical imagination. In the past four years it has developed numerous events and significant interventions in cinema, performance, music, spoken word, theory, visual arts, socially engaged and activism-based practices, and pedagogy. It has become an indispensable resource for migrant knowing and a stronghold for contemporary art and alternate pedagogies in East Helsinki, congregating international and domestic communities.
