École du soir (Evening School, EDS for short) is a multiform hosting structure for collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action. EDS is convened by artist Christian Nyampeta, with the support of and alongside a chorus of fellow artists, institutions, and networks. 

The structure of this “evening school” draws from Senegalese writer and film director Ousmane Sembène, who saw cinema as cours du soir or “evening classes”. Informed by the traditions of orality, sensuality and conviviality within the realm of art learning and making in his region. He viewed cinema as a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience and public dissemination, employing a methodology concerning the use of cinema’s collective production, and investing in viewing methods that drew from different uses of time, visual and textual histories, social struggles and hopes, in mutuality between his own locality and the world at large.

École du soir has a new website, https://evening-school.org/, made possible with the European Union Prize at Rencontres de Bamako that Nyampeta won in 2019. The website will include listings of past, current and future programmes and iterations of EDS, alongside digital resources, libraries, playlists, and online screenings. It also features a dedicated live platform for streaming live events and performances. Additionally, EDS will introduce an invitation-based distribution channel for pedagogical use in the near future

YOU CAN GET INVOLVED! 

The resources of École du soir are available not only to the members and working groups of ARAC but also to any other people who wish to host events in their own contexts. Since it was launched at the ARAC-ARA Symposium on Artistic Education in Africa in Johannesburg in February 2020, EDS has already been shared in Kampala, New York, and in Maseru.

The only precondition is that the organisers of Écoles du soir are asked to feed back their experiences using this web platform so that their insights will contribute to the widening of the networks and communities of practice concerned and confronted with similar issues. For more information, contact Em Joseph at em@ecoledusoir.net

This was the programme for the inaugural École du soir, which unfolded over the course of five evenings during the ARAC-ARA Symposium on Artistic Education in Africa in Johannesburg in February 2020.