As part of the Africa 2020 Season (postponed to 2021), the Centre Pompidou and the Bibliothèque publique d’information have given carte blanche to the South African collective Chimurenga. From April 2 to May 3, they propose a new edition of the Chimurenga Library, a long-term intervention that produces knowledge in order to reimagine the library as a laboratory of extended curiosity, critical reflection, daydreaming, socio-political involvement, celebration and reading.
“The Chimurenga Library operates through the dissemination of knowledge and the infiltration of tools in the form of a “Black Study” of the Bpi’s collections, in order to investigate the genealogies of the black radical imagination in the francophone world. “Black Study refers to the set of methods and bodies of knowledge that black people have developed to survive and counteract Western modernity, whose construction and consolidation were based on slavery, colonization and forms of apartheid. Fundamentally undisciplined, it is a way of learning based on relationship, group improvisation, and the reactivation of a grounded knowledge of freedom. ”
Accompanied by Bérénice Lefebvre, head of ENSAPC’s silkscreen and digital printing workshop and under the direction of the collective and curators, several students-Alice Bondoki, Maximilien Curtis, Justin Ebanda Ebanda, Lorena Almario Rojas, Maéva Conderolle, Louise Guégan and Garance Butler-Oliva – participate in the conception of an alternative classification system and new reading routes through the production of typographic and signage elements, images and facsimiles of books and magazines.
