The Diasporic Schools

“Since last year, the Free School of Kunstenfestivaldesarts is a project dedicated to the sharing of practices and artistic experiments for forms of knowledge. By bringing together different formats, it aims at creating a temporary, open and accessible school.

With The Diasporic Schools, Kunstenfestivaldesarts commissions and presents six new artistic projects, from artists reflecting on the heritage and the present they relate to. Each of them develop an artistic project based on new forms of circulation of knowledge in diasporic contexts, and transmission as a political and empowering tool.

In An Audio Family Album, Bouchra Khalili continues her investigation of Al Assifa’s methodology based on the dying tradition of Al-halqa, the oldest performing art in North Africa. Collaborating with a younger generation of members of the same communities living nowadays in Europe, she proposes an online archive of voices, bringing together stories of emancipation that have helped shape the memories and contemporary strategies of diaspora struggles and that, through this process, are passed on from one generation to the next. Across geographies and generations, these stories form a collective family album where, as in the Al-halqa tradition, the voices embody the living and nomadic memory of people’s struggles for collective emancipation.”

Programming dates

An Audio Family Album Releases

October 26th | Capsules 1 and 2

October 27th | Capsules 3 and 4

October 28th | Capsules 5 and 6

October 29th | Capsules 7 and 8

Public programme

Bouchra Khalili will discuss An Audio Family Album on October 31st as part of The Diasporic Schools Public programme.