17 Apr –
8 May 2024
Workshop: Maintaining the Root
Framer Framed invites you to join Maintaining the Root, a series of performance workshops with Congolese performance artist Sarah Ndele. Maintaining the Root is organised as part of a collaboration between Planetary Poetics – a two year master’s programme hosted in collaboration with Framer Framed at the Sandberg Institute – and Picha, and deals with colonial heritage and connection with ancestry through performance.
To cross a river or a path, I need the person who came before me. He can show me where to set foot. He knows if the river is deep or not, if the path I’m taking is mortal or not.
Sarah Ndele is a visual and performance artist who lives and works in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her work questions the memory, the roots and the present of the Bakongo people in the west of the DRC. It is based on exploring what has been lost and finding ways to reconnect to her ancestors: “If I draw on Yombé works, it’s not just to find a style or develop a singular style of writing, but it’s also a personal process: to nurture my roots, which are gradually dissipating. The more generations pass, the more history fades.”
The workshop series Maintaining the Root offers different exercises that explore the practice of ‘rooting’, which Sarah Ndele has been developing in light of the numerous losses her people have dealt with due to violent forms of colonisation in the past and present. An example of this is the loss of local languages, including the script of Luzitu – a term that means ‘intense respect’ in the artist’s mother tongue Kiyombé. Throughout the workshops, she will share her work as a performance artist, a workshop organiser, and as one of the organisers of the yearly performance festival Kin-Etelemi-Telemi in Kinshasa. Participants will work towards a final collective performance, which takes place on 8 May 2024 and is open to the public.
Workshop dates
17 April | 15:00 – 17:00
24 April | 15:00 – 17:00
1 May | 15:00 – 17:00
Final performance
8 May | 18:00 – 19:30
Acknowledgments
Maintaining the Root is organised as part of a collaboration between Planetary Poetics, a master’s programme exploring key concepts of the ecological crisis hosted in collaboration with Framer Framed and Dorine van Meel at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and Picha, an independent art initiative that seeks to promote artistic creation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Sarah Ndele’s research period and project in the Netherlands is generously funded by the DOEN Foundation.
Framer Framed is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; Amsterdam Fund for the Arts; Municipality of Amsterdam; and VriendenLoterij Fonds.
Location
Framer Framed
Oranje-Vrijstaatkade 71
1093 KS, Amsterdam
Education / Colonial history / Open Call / Performance / Planetary Poetics / Workshop /
Exhibitions
Exhibition: The One-Straw Revolution
An exhibition curated by iLiana Fokianaki exploring permaculture as a methodology for exhibition-making
Agenda
Counter-extractivism: Poetics of remedy and transmission
A closing event for cultural practitioner Jean-Sylvain Tshilumba Mukendi’s seminar on politics and extractivism at the Planetary Poetics master's programme at the Sandberg Institute
Planetary Poetics: Ancestral Assemblage
A gathering by artist Ismal Muntaha and Planetary Poetics
Network
Jean-Sylvain Tshilumba Mukendi
Cultural practitioner, researcher and writer
Sarah Ndele
Visual and performance artist
