RAW ACADEMY APPLICATION – SESSION 2 – SPRING 2024

3rd April – 26th May 2024
Application deadline January 31st 2024
Before filling out the application at this link, please read over the entirety of the form to prepare all the necessary documents.
You will need to upload:

1. A cover/motivation letter.
2. A full CV
3. A short bio of 250 words
4. A project Description
5. A Letter of recommendation
6. A portrait picture of yourself
7. Health information

WHAT IS RAW ACADEMY?
RAW Academy is aimed at freshly graduates from art schools, curatorial programmes and humanities. It is dedicated to a lively reflection on artistic thinking, curatorial practice and critical writing. The programme is structured around two distinctive sessions per year of 8 weeks each taking place from October to December and from April to June. RAW Academy exposes participating fellows and Lead Faculty to the current critical and dynamic artistic environment of Dakar as well to its history, while providing them with a free space for exploration, investigation, research and production of their own ideas. The programme is designed to promote intense exchange and continuous dialogue organized around public and closed sessions that include seminars, presentations, research, production, and visits of cultural institutions. Exhibitions and publications will be conceived and elaborated within this context for production at a later stage.Each session is directed by a Lead Faculty who has displayed an off the beaten paths practice of artistic and curatorial imagination. Every academy session is built around a relevant conceptual framework elaborated by the Lead Faculty with contributions of invited fellow professionals. The conceptual framework is a compelling basis for the analysis and production of the fellows’ as well as the faculty’s work and areas of inquiry. The Lead Faculty has absolute freedom for the conception of the content of the programme for the session of her/his responsibility.
Conceptual Framework:
“Angazi, but I’m sure”
“Angazi, but I’m sure” is a common South African phrase. In English it means: “I don’t know, but I am sure”. It is a deliberately self-contradictory phrase that is usually spoken in prelude to a reply – often, when one is asked for directions or facts. “Angazi, but I’m sure if you turn left you will get there”; “Angazi, but I’m sure they will start at 9pm”. The respondent is uncertain – of what they “know”. Or, perhaps, they are certain, but they do not know how to speak it. Or, they know, but do not know what they know. Sharing knowledge in this way requires mutual trust – it is speculation, in every sense of the word.
“Angazi, but I’m sure” is a break between our linguistic selves and a world, between knowledge and our ability to speak or map it – the knowledge that is elevated as finished product. The phrase suggests that arriving is as much about displacement as about place. More urgently, it affirms lived experience, improvisation and imagination as themselves forms of knowledge. It calls for a knowing through seeking and a constant transforming and renewing of our image of the world. Finally, it is an expression of community: “I know you will find the way”.
How do we learn to know what we know? How can we draw from disparate and often intersecting practices through which we stylise our conduct and daily life on the continent? How do we harness the inventiveness, the generative resilience and the agility with which we live?
This 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 and creativity and beauty that define the contemporary African moment.
Chimurenga has long considered the shebeen (illegal drinking tavern) as a college of music. Can we draw on the improvisational, pedagogical method of black musics, where learning is collapsed into performing, and teachers and learners share the stage? How do we embrace knowledge not as information but as a methodology – a way of learning that expresses the conditions of our lives, our very existence. Can we take seriously food as knowledge, music as research and pan-Africanism as a practice? What if maps were made by Africans for their own use, to understand and make visible their own realities and imaginaries? What could the curriculum be – if it was designed by the people who dropped out of school so that they could breathe?
These are some of the queries this session will investigate, via the forms and media we use – such as cartography, comics, library-making, music, food, broadcasting and publishing, and in collaboration with Yemisi Aribisala, Yvonne Owuor, Neo Muyanga, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Ibou Fall, Dominique Malaquais, Jihan el Tahri, Kodwo Eshun, Ayi Kwei Armah, Philippe Rekacewicz, Felwine Sarr, Lionel Manga.
The programme is tuition free. Sucessful applicants will have to cover for their travel arrangements (including visa), accommodation, insurance and costs of living in Dakar for 8 weeks. Depending on work schedule, simple meals/snacks may be offered occasionally
PREREQUISITES

1. Successful applicants are required to commit to be in Dakar throughout the duration of the session; arriving no later than a day before the beginning and departing no earlier than a day after the end.
2. Be a graduate of an art school, curatorial programme, architecture school or any department of humanities
3. Be fluent in either French or English and have a fair knowledge of the other. Successful applicants will be skype interviewed in both languages for assessment.

DIRECTIONS FOR COMPLETING THE APPLICATION
Please complete the sections to the best of your ability. Once your completed application is received, it will be reviewed and you will be notified of your status in the application process.
rawmaterialcompany.org