by Christian Nyampeta
The activities of the Nyanza Working Group Artists Home have focussed on a programme situated at the intersection of the bibliographies and biographies of modern and contemporary philosophers in Rwanda. Working within an itinerant structure, two modalities have channeled these activities of the Working Group’s programme. These two modalities are 1) conversations with the philosophers–members of the Artists Home, namely Fr Fabien Hagenimana, Dr Obed Quinet Niyikza, Dr Olivier Nyirubugara, and Dr Isaïe Nzeyimana, and 2) the transmission of these conversations though the staging of exhibitions and its related activities including public events and publications. The conversations are presented as edited videos and transcriptions of these the entirety of the conversations.
Conversation and Discourse
By way of questioning the discourse of “contemporary art” and “education” in the context of Rwanda, the Nyanza Working Group stages formal and informal conversations as ways of creating another discourse on art education. The Artists Home rehearses the hypothesis that one of the distinguishing features of our being in the world is the awareness of our own being with other beings. With this hypothesis, a conversation and its “language” is the vector in which this awareness is expressed. The activities of Artists Home study this conversation within the idiom of philosophy. Philosophy here is understood as the conception of ideas. Here resides the tension between the conception of one’s own ideas and the conversation between one’s own idea with other, possibly opposing conceptions of ideas. Artists Home sees this conversation as an avenue towards concretising a public discourse on art learning and art making. Our turn to philosophical ideas developed in the locality of Rwanda and its linguistic surroundings is a methodological dispositif for materializing concepts with which to study the uses of art in the context of Rwanda.
The historical sources from which our study is anchored include the works Maniragaba Balibutsa, Edouard Gasarabwe and Abbé Alexis Kagame. The field of philosophy has antecedents which reach back into the colonial period of 1950’s when Rwanda was still a trust territory of the Kingdom of Belgium.
Standing out is indeed the work of the late priest Alexis Kagame, with his doctoral thesis, La Philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’Être, published by the Belgian Academie Royale des Sciences Coloniale in 1955. This work is also considered the earliest (ethno)philosophical text authored by a Sub-Saharan writer. Our new angle of research is the study of the meaning and the practice of rest in these works. Rest is a particularly fertile concept to study in relation to art learning and making in Rwanda, because of its relation to the practices of the body, its connotations with cohabitation, hospitality and domesticity, and also because of its relation to the structuring of calendrical times and to the organizing of public space and infrastructure.
View visual materials including transcriptions of our conversations
