(Re)generating trust #3: AU-EU Youth Cooperation breaks barriers through art

Biography:

Laura Ong’ayo Liboi, know as Liboi (her performing name), is a Kenyan singer and songwriter based in Nairobi, Kenya. Using her creative ability to express the human experience, question humanity and improve the well-being of the deprived in society, Liboi is a strong proponent for social change, culture, and mental awareness. She creates music that blends traditional music with elements of popular African genres.

Link to Instagram profile

Biography:

Mahad is a Somali photographer. He describes himself as an “architecture photographer”. His focus is on ruined and heritage buildings. With these, he witnesses and reflects on  how civilizations build masterpieces with such low technological advancement.

Link to Instagram profile

Biography:

Martina is an Italian/Chilean screenwriter who lives in Rome. She has a degree in Performing Arts and Sciences at Sapienza University of Rome 2017- 2021, a specialisation degree in Screenwriting from Sentieri Selvaggi Scuola 2021, and followed a course in Cinematic writing skills and scriptwriting in 2020.

Link to LinkedIn profile

Biography:

Najma Saleh is a Kenyan/Somali poet, also nicknamed “Drops of Melanin”. She describes herself as a spoken word artist, author, poet, and fashionista, but she can best be described in one word: resilience. She grew up in a marginalised community and went through a rough patch in life that saw her drop out of campus and end up in hospital. As she braved the lonely hospitalisation period, she remained sane by venting through poems, which gave birth to an emotional book that introduced her to the world. Najma now performs across the world and has worked with international actors such as World Vision and the UN.

Link to Instagram profile

Biography:

Maïmouna Jallow was one of the creative directors of the ArtXChange programme. She is a Gambian/Spanish producer, actress, multidisciplinary artist, content creator and educator. In 2021, she wrote and directed her debut film, Tales of the Accidental City, an experimental feature-length based on a stage play, which received several awards, including the Audience Award at Cine Invisible in Bilbao, Spain. She is the author of the children’s book I’m the Colour of Honey, and in 2018, edited an anthology of 12 re-imagined African folktales entitled Story Story, Story Come (Pavaipo/Ouida Books). In 2021, she was the Artistic Director of the East African Soul Train, an interdisciplinary arts residency and research programme, investigating new ways of collaborating virtually and engaging audiences across geographical boundaries. In 2016, she co-founded Positively African, a Nairobi-based arts and media platform, and organised two editions of the Re-Imagined Storytelling Festival. A lover of the stage, Maimouna has toured four continents with a one-woman adaptation of Lola Shoneyin’s novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives. She holds an MA in African Literature from SOAS, University of London.

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Biography:

Elise Cuny is the Chair of culture Solutions. She specialises in Africa-Europe partnerships with a focus on youth support and international exchanges in the development of cultural and creative industries. She spent three years in Rwanda as part of an international investigation team on the 1994 Genocide of the Tutsi, and developed knowledge and expertise on the field of memory policies. She started designing and recording (Re)generating trust podcast series in February 2023 to shed light on the links between youth and culture in EU’s external relations, assess the impact of cultural cooperation programmes on youth and feed future policies and projects with their views.  

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Damien Helly (00:00): You are listening to the Composing trust podcast, by culture Solutions – a series on European cultural action with the world. Is Europe still attractive? How is it perceived outside the EU? How do Europeans promote culture together in the world and with which partners? What have they learned together, what is their experience? Our Composing trust podcast series will address these issues. 

Elise Cuny (00:35):

This is the third episode of our series (Re)generating trust, shedding light on and questioning the links between youth and culture in EU’s international relations. In this episode, we hear the views from four artists and one creative director of the ArtXChange project: Laura Ong’ayo Liboi – Kenyan singer and song writer; Mahad Mahammed – Somali photographer; Martina Carniglia – Italian/Chilean screenwriter; Najma Swaleh – Kenyan/Somali poet; and Maïmouna Jallow – Gambian/Spanish producer and actress, one of the co-creative Directors of the programme.

The podcast starts with an extract of a song performed by Liboi entitled “Freedom” and ends with a poem written and read by Najma.

ArtXChange was set up as part of one of the African Union-European Union Youth Cooperation Hub projects. The AU-EU Youth Cooperation Hub was launched at the 5th AU-EU Summit in Abidjan in 2017. It lasted from 2018 to 2021 and gathered 42 young experts from both continents. The project drew from the Abidjan Declaration of the 4th Africa-Europe Youth summit calling on AU and EU member states to “support young people working in creative industries through local structures, investment in training, leadership, management, production and promotion of culture for young people.”

Within the AU-EU Youth Cooperation Hub, a cluster for culture, art and sport was established. This cluster, along the six other ones, had the task to set up a pilot project with support from civil society organisations to reinforce cooperation and youth in that field. And that is how the impactful ArtXChange project was born.

Liboi (3:23): My name is Liboi. I come from Nairobi, Kenya. I am an artist, storyteller, who uses different medium to express herself. I use music, African contemporary music, folk or traditional music, fused with popular African genres. I’m also a filmmaker and a journalist. A particular moment from the experience from ArtXChange that has stuck with me, I would say body mapping, because it’s gave me time to ask myself questions that I’ve been ignoring for a very long time. Body mapping was describing who you are, yourself, without using words. You map yourself on a canvas and you use paint and colour, whichever that works for you. You could use drawings, paintings to describe who you are, your force, why you began this journey as a creative, the path you want to take as a creative. First of all, they were between ourselves, interacting with each other’s pieces to get to understand each other more and then we later on installed them in the exhibition that we had.

Martina (4:20): My name is Martina, I’m Italo-Chilean. I’m a screenwriter and film producer. As Liboi, I love storytelling, I’m in love with stories. I think it’s something that gets us all together in a way. The moments I keep with myself more present in image and in feelings is when we were doing the exposition in Palazzo Merulana here in Rome. I remember the first official repetition of the exposition, the whole complex we were creating for days, that was exhausting, and we were all crazy in these days. But I remember when I saw the whole project and I just thought like “wow, we did this”, altogether, we managed to create this beautiful thing.

Mahad (5:25): I’m Mahad, I’m from Somalia and I live in Mogadishu (Muqdisho). I do photography. One vivid memory I remember is the one in Rome. Getting out of that comfort zone and finding a way to blend photography with the other artistic disciplines, poetry and also religion. The group that I was working with was mostly focusing on Michelangelo’s third paradise from a religious perspective. One of the things that stuck with me was to be able to go outside and just meet random people on the streets of Rome, and casually ask them questions about their experience in the third paradise and some follow-up questions. I collected all that information and depicted it as photographs and set up a photo collage, went around just taking random pictures and then created something that reflects what they say. This is special to me and I still continue to do it.

Najma (6:30): My name is Najma, I’m a writer and a poet. I came across ArtXChange when I was doing the first co-creation residency in Nairobi. I met some amazing human beings who we’re still friends until now. From that I got the opportunity to join some of the crew in Rome. I have so many amazing, amazing memories. One of my favourite memories has to be when we had our body mapping with Xavier (Verhoest). I met one of my best friends, Liboi. She saw parts of me that I don’t think I’ve ever shown other people without talking, without saying anything, just being expressive.

Maïmouna (07:10): My name is Maïmouna and I am a writer and director working mainly in theatre, and a bit of film. And I was one of the creative directors for the ArtXChange programme when we did a three week residency in Nairobi and then also in Rome, which was a bit shorter, seven or eight days, both with some of the same artists and also new artists coming in. I am Gambian-Spanish, but spent a decade in Nairobi. One of the very special memories of the experience with the art exchange programme has been to see how such strong bonds are created in a very short time. We go really deep. The artists are able to explore who they are, what they want to represent through their work because they’re given the space and time to do so. And at the same time, they then come together and birth something new. And so seeing this process happen, is honestly for me, always like seeing some kind of magic being created because you come in basically into a space where everything is possible. You come in with all the skills that you have with your own ideas, but it’s basically a blank slate. And then in that process of getting to know each other, but also getting to explore yourself more deeply, you see how something new is created, and something that reflects the individual artist, but also something that is a universal language that they all share.

Elise (8:44): The four artists experienced co-creation, a process in which they blended their art techniques and cultural perspectives, a geographical and technical encounter. This was done in artist residencies with exercises to introduce themselves to one another and through artistic projects which were then exposed in exhibitions and shows.

In May 2022, the four artists we hear in this podcast, but also 16 others from the ArtXChange project, met in Rome for a six-day workshop to create a show and exhibition at the Palazzo Merulana in Rome. In preparing it, they were supported by Maimouna Jallow, who will hear on the importance of creating the right space for co-creation, Xavier Verhoest, visual artist and curator and Lorenzo Romito, Italian architect. During this spectacle, closing the residency, artists explored the role of arts in society, both from a personal and collective perspective. For this, they were inspired by the work and philosophy of Michelangelo Pistoletto and his third paradise.

The concept of third paradise, “il terzo paradiso” in Italian, was born in 2003 as a symbol drawn by Michelangelo Pistoletto. The symbol is a reconfiguration of the mathematical sign for infinity with a third circle inserted inside, representing a generative womb of a new humanity capable of overcoming the destructive conflict between the two polarities of nature and artifice in society today. The show entitled “Into the Mirror” relied on different artistic methodologies such as body mapping, dance, storytelling, poetry, music, photography, videos and digital art.

Martina (10:40): I never had the chance and I don’t know if I would ever have another chance to live such a beautiful experience. We had an idea of what we had to talk about but we only had a week to get our heads all together and synchronise our thoughts. We had some artists that were guiding us through this journey and they were giving us some instruments and helping us to really materialise the whole exposition.

Elise (11:11): In artist residencies, what is the role of creative directors to allow to create the conditions for co-creation? I asked Maimouna and then I asked the artists how they experienced it. For some, it was the first time they experienced it and also with such depth.

Maïmouna (11:27): Seeing how the co-creation process works is always just very special. The initial step is always trying to create a space that is safe because I think that artists create best when they feel safe. So part of the creative direction that we do is around that, you know, the getting to know each other process and realising that there’s no right or wrong answer and that the process and the journey are just as important as the final product that you’re going to create. I work more around storytelling, narrative creations. My colleague Xavier Verhoest does body mapping and more visual art.

He was leading sessions around that. A lot of these things are interrelated. It’s all about expression at the end of the day, whether you use words, whether you use paints. And then we gave the artists time to themselves, how they could work together, form their own groups. It was something that we didn’t feel like we had to puppet master because within the process they had already decided to do the collaboration with this person, like “I’m a poet and I would love to do something with a dancer…” So they went off, created their own pieces, and then our role became much more around production and helping them put it together a show. 

I think that’s one of the elements that we forget, but when you have to present the work in such a short amount of time to a public audience, it’s really important that it works, that there’s a kind of narrative thread, that there’s a journey that the audience is taken through as well. So the production element and then directing the final creation was part of our role.

Najma (13:05): Xavier gave us a very open platform and asked us questions which allowed ourselves to express ourselves without also feeling the pressure too. He made it so easy. He asked us questions like how did you become an artist? What led you to be an artist? What are the outside elements that inspire your art? And what are the inside things that you feel yourself as a human being, as a person that helps you in the growth of your art? Those are the things that really encouraged us to have a connection with ourselves but also with our fellow artists.

Mahad (13:39): I used to think like I do my own way and the artists that I’m collaborating with do their own way and we just exchange ideas but then I was stuck with my own.

That’s what I thought initially. After doing the co-creation in Rome, I changed the way I used to see co-creation. It’s not something that I want to do, it’s something that we want to co-create, we collaborate, we blend our ideas together. And whatever comes out of it, it’s not just something that represents one brain, it’s something that collides different beliefs, different ways of thinking, different ways of creation, different ways of presenting. I used to do photography in a way, but with this co-creation,

I had to change the way I think, the way I present. I even created the first time, like collage photography, just collecting different postcards in Rome, finding a way to pitch it together and pick the story. I worked with a lot of photographers and found through their eyes, through their photographs the meaning and also what I was feeling and what I wanted to transmit. I knew how to do it in words but not through images. It was such an important process to trust their eyes and trust the way they see it and synchronising the way we think and the way we wanted to transmit.

Najma (15:13): In the process of co-creation, I have learned that we as artists are all trying to solve the same problems just from different directions. For example, I did a co-creation, one of my favourite co-creation projects with Bea. Bea is a mural artist from Italy. She’s also from Kenya. Yeshihareg (Comas), who is a dancer from Ethiopia and Spain. In the process of co-creation, we were tackling identity crisis. The three of us are from two different countries. The process and the story of identity crisis kept on coming up. All of us felt like we didn’t belong anywhere. But as you grow up, you try to create a safe space for yourself or for the people around you. And that safe space has consistently proven to be the art that we are doing. So we found home in our arts. That’s how we co-created that project. And I will have to say it’s one of my favourite things I’ve done through ArtXChange.

Liboi (16:18): Co-creation, in as much as you’re telling the story, you’re also having an opportunity to learn each other’s cultures. There are perceptions we have that when you get to a different setting or environment or culture, you realise, my God, there are things that back at home I overlook, but they do exist, or there are things that happen here that can happen at home to change the narrative. It’s a learning ground and also a ground for us to pick up solutions for ourselves back at home.

Elise (16:50): Each of our episodes takes a look at the why and the how of cultural cooperation projects. Understanding the parameters is crucial in assessing not only the impact but the living experience, the feeling of achievement and success for these projects which nurture international cultural relations. Once again, the ArtXChange project exemplifies how the successes of these programmes depend on the work put in by implementing civil society organisations, by creative directors and advisors surrounding the project, and by the time dedicated to the preparation and selection of participants.

Maïmouna (17:28): A lot of thought was put into the selection process to make sure that there was diversity, not only in terms of what countries artists were coming from, but how long they had been practising, what kind of disciplines. It was really critical for us that it be an interdisciplinary programme so that we could have those kinds of exciting collaborations and not necessarily obvious ones, not necessarily the musician with the dancer, but maybe the painter with the dancer. And which is why there was a lot of time also for them just to spend time together. You know, when you’re in a residency, it’s also the lunch, it’s also the coffee.

I remember one artist sang opera and one evening they all went out and she started singing under a bridge, if I recall correctly, and everybody sang along with her. And when reading the feedback forms after the residency, what this artist said I think will always stick with me because, and I’ll quote her, she said, this is what it feels like to be alive. I didn’t know, but now I know.

So it was really an experience that was beyond the creation, the final product, but about these conversations and these connections and finding out about each other’s cultures and each other’s practice. The conditions are felt by the artists and it impacts their experience of international cultural relations.

Elise (18:51): I asked them how much they felt connected to an international community of artists before and after art exchange. Some shared how they hoped to broaden the scope to their own cultural environment back home.

Liboi (19:04): Before ArtXChange, I was connected to international artists, but the levels are different. When it came to ArtXChange, I now have connections with artists who are practising and artists who view art differently, completely differently, which is a good thing. It’s no longer just sitting down and writing, but more of putting in the thought, what it is you want to express, how differently can you express it, how differently can you work with other people, or how differently can you use different fields of art to deliver this message. So it became different. And I would say the connection had a meaning. It had a meaning to me. It had a meaning even to them, I believe. And it was also beyond the artistic environment and more of also the cultural experience, because we were learning different things from each other. I feel very, very connected to artists from Europe and even different countries in Africa.

Martina (20:07): I was pretty convinced that we were connected, but ArtXChange was like the real proof that we can work together and co-create and just enjoy our company and be together as artists and just respect and enjoy each other’s manifestations and ways of being. I think ArtXChange helped me to have real proof that we can do it and we should do it more.

Maïmouna (20:40): I actually remember that we had an evening session where everybody basically got about five minutes to showcase some of their favourite work and I remember how just everybody was in awe of everybody else, because although we had done introductions at that moment you saw the work that these people had been doing before and it was just such a beautiful session. Everyone was in awe and saying “my goodness, I didn’t know you could paint like that or my goodness, your voice”. And it was really inspiring. I think that at that moment, everybody felt like, okay, we’re here and we’re going to do something and we’re going to create something new.

Mahad (21:19): It gave me the idea of introducing international artists to the city that I live in, creating and organising it with the National Museum. Like lots of people visit the exhibitions, get to meet artists from other countries in Europe and Africa, in Sweden, in Kenya and Italy. Their work being there (exposed) affected so many artists, inspired them, and also inspired international artists as well who were not able to make it to Mogadishu. So that connection helped me realise that that’s what art is for.

Elise (22:00): Artists travel and discover new places but local artists too re-experience their own space.

Najma (22:07): Interculturally when we went to Rome I had to understand how other people appreciate art and things like that and it’s not that it’s very different from how we do it, it’s just that sometimes people have no knowledge of how these things work. It made me appreciate the connections that I have made.

Martina (22:30): Yes, something that we think and we see, like there are borders and barriers, like physical ones in the whole world, but I think as artists we cross them and it was not like something that stopped us to communicate and to try to show our inner self. I had the chance to see Italy, with people who haven’t seen Italy ever. And it was interesting, like having other conceptions of life and my life in Italy, you know.

Najma (23:11): I very much understood that these places are very much accessible to people like me, like being Muslim, being a woman and being from Africa. These places are not very hard to access and they’re very much available once you tap into them, but also understanding that this was my chance to create connections and make people from home also understand that anything is possible.

Maïmouna (23:39): The act of being immersed in a new space, it could even be in your own country, but suddenly you are immersed in a different town and you’re there with new people and you’re discovering new things, it basically reminds you to be curious. And I think that a lot of artistic creation departs from this kind of curiosity, right? It’s an exploration. It’s about a search, a search for an essence, a search for a truth. And I think a lot of that time in that search, first of all, you might find something new, something that you were not actually looking for. It’s about being open to the process. In a search for a truth, you kind of realise that there are universal truths so that we can all share issues around identity. We might be from very different contexts, but this search for identity and belonging is something that we all share, but that we can all come to from a very different perspective: I’m walking in certain shoes and that is what I’m contributing to this larger narrative that we’re creating together.

Elise (24:48): What I liked in the exchange I had with Maimouna is that she spoke not of impact, but of success, something more personal that can be felt by artists and that they can be proud of. So what does success look like when it comes to international cultural cooperation projects?

Maïmouna (25:04): For me, what determines the success of something like that is whether it lives on beyond the program. What has been really special about this is that, yes, you have maybe a week, maybe you have three weeks together in which you are sharing and you’re in the same space and it’s organised for you, but to see the kinds of collaborations that have happened afterwards without any external input from anybody, for me determines that the connections that were created were real.

Elise (25:34): What we aim at showing in Culture Solutions’ podcast series is that there are many initiatives that need to be flagged more, known better, and that there are always areas of improvement. Beneficiaries of the projects are the best placed and best suited to share such feedback on the programme and to place their feedback in a regional political reality on which they also have a say. International cultural relations of course depend on international relations and in this case also of interregional relations on the African continent. Artists’ experiences and environments are impacted by national, regional and international policies on which they have a say and a view.

Maïmouna (26:15): What really saddens me is that it is still so difficult for African artists to travel. And here I’m not even talking about trying to get to Italy, for example, or to get to France, but even to sometimes for an East African artist to go to West Africa. There’s so many issues, first of all, around visas and travel permits. But of course, as a continent, we’re very divided. We’re divided along not only our geographical borders, but also our linguistic borders.

And sometimes as a Kenyan artist, you might know more of what’s happening in the UK, for example, than you might know what’s happening in Burkina Faso. I think that this is something that has to be changed on a political level. We have to get to know each other as Africans. I think the whole point of the African Union was about that, right? About creating this kind of Pan-African ideal, but not just as a philosophy, but something that we can practise as artists. There has been not enough done so that the mobility of artists is something that can be done realistically, practically, which means that we don’t know each other, which means that we remain very divided, which means that the power of our art and the power of our messages is also diluted because we’re not speaking to each other. I think that we need to look at mobility and also mobility within the African continent.

I think the fact that we have artists not just from one African country, for example, collaborating with another European country is very important because that means that as African artists we’re circulating amongst ourselves as well. And often programs that are funded like this work in silos. So it might be that a project is looking for Ugandan artists to collaborate with British artists. And for me, that creates a kind of forced collaboration. Some might work really well, but a lot of the time by putting those limitations on the artists, yeah, you’re controlling the outcome in a way. And the whole point is not to control the outcome, but to create spaces for real connections to happen. So allow it. If it’s actually the Ugandan artist who wants to collaborate with the Togolese artists, let’s find ways to allow that to happen. I think that that is the next step, right, that we need to take. I think young people have a crucial part to play in the cultural sector.

Liboi (28:38): I think our energies, creativity and innovations do control a bigger chunk to the sector and even to the economy because art drives economies out here. We need to participate more. Maybe there are needs’ assessments done, but it would be nice to have voices to hear from us, the creatives. We keep having conversations with Erica, Chiara and Maimouna about how it helped us, how we could have more of such experiences or how we can have even at exchange done differently, but just not let it die like that. Such conversations help us to know more ways of handling things, more ways of continuing with these projects to make them sustainable for both parties like us as the beneficiaries and ArtXChange organisers. At the end of the day, it will not be us, the same people, who will attend the next projects so we are trying to give them feedback so that we create a safer place.

Mahad (29:47): Somalia is in a very unique position when it comes to the art scene. There’s no structure in place, there’s no active cultural institution that’s performing within Somalia. So getting to learn from all this, and experiencing all of this just left me unable to share as much as I would have loved to because it’s a big challenge. Like you wouldn’t know where to begin. Maybe find a way to support or create an institution so that this thing goes on and on and then it passes on from one creative to another.

Martina (30:21): Giving the visibility to these amazing opportunities for artists to co-create is important and supporting them not just through the project but giving them tools so even after what you gain in this experience it allows you to keep working on yourself and on your art.

Elise (30:43): As our podcast is coming to an end and we have heard powerful views of artists from Kenya, Somalia and Italy, I want to give the final word to Najma who’s calling for even more solidarity among artists. Najma hopes that the space she had access to can be open to even more artists and that more creative hubs will emerge for artists to meet, learn and discover their own culture. This call for justice and solidarity sums up exactly all the beauty and the potential of international cultural relations. Based on trust and sincerity, international cultural relations help artists to know themselves better, to realise by themselves their cultural background, and its perception outside the national realm and how to expand that knowledge to more people. The statement of Najma is to me as powerful as an impact assessment as it tells all the energy and willingness of youth to share their knowledge, make it profitable to their communities and build lasting international cultural relations. It shows how arts among youth hopefully makes emerge a counter-trend to conflictual politics and prepares a next generation of leaders, both in Africa and Europe, smart enough to go beyond traditional relations and divides, and generous enough not to be searching to keep the luck and access to themselves.

Najma (32:04): I feel like there is much more need for space for amateur artists because I feel like there are so many people who are starting right now and they have no direction. They feel like they have no access to these big spaces because they don’t know where to start and it takes time for amateur artists to get to where we have gotten over a long period of time. So I feel like there’s a need for maybe a writing hub, a painting hub, spaces that are accessible for amateur artists to also nurture these artists. What do we do to make sure that these spaces are also accessible for people who are starting right now. I have actually done an exhibition with Xavier (Verhoest) and I made sure that many people of my community attended those events. I have attended an event with the UN and also with UNICEF. I’m in constant need of making sure that people and new artists who are coming up have one-on-one conversations with me to learn. Yet, I feel like that is not helpful enough. As much as I try my best to share the knowledge and to show people that these spaces are accessible, I can’t develop their work overnight and show everybody. I feel like we got sheer luck to be honest to join the ArtXChange project because if you think about it they’re not even sure yet if there’s going to be another one. Now how do I tell these people that there’s another art exchange and I’m not even sure if there’s another one?

Excerpt of the poem ““Still I stand as I am” by Najma (33:34):

“A negative film

that is yet to be clean.

My skin is made of foreign jewellery engraved in orange beads.

I laugh at the end of every bad movie because

I like to know the end to everything except to my story of belonging.

Aspiring to be the people I do not know and hoping not to be like the ones I do.

I am the girl that takes a flight back to a land she cannot claim out loud 

Backspace crash out written about a couple of times

Before moving forward because how do you write about a land

that is not yet ready to listen.

Staring out bare exposed

FaceTime calls with bad Wi-Fi of a long distance family lost connections

and forced separations

I am the things I cannot throw away.”

Elise (34:37): The recording was made possible thanks to the support and coordination of the implementing organisation CISP, in particular the programme manager Erika Mascarro and the cultural technical advisor Chiara Camozzi. A huge thanks for their time, trust and patience in releasing this episode.

Damien Helly (35:10): Thank you for listening to today’s episode of our Composing trust podcast by culture Solutions! If you liked it, you can subscribe and follow us on your favourite podcast platforms, and contact us at culturesolutions.eu.