GLASMOOG presents: Colliding Circulations – Dakar Mobilities Between Global Connections and Local Displacements

Between 15 May and 2 July 2023, exhibitions, film screenings, workshops, lecture-performances, and roundtable discussions on the relationship between connections to and exclusions from global networks will take place at various locations in Cologne.

In globalized networks, the ability to join groups and systems, along with their logics, is considered an essential prerequisite for participation. The curatorial project The Entire Story Starts Where, on the other hand, is interested in deviant practices that temporarily and strategically connect to media, economic, political, scientific, social, and cultural networks, but at the same time step out of them, subvert them, and thereby produce self-determined exclusions.

The Colliding Circulations exhibition on display at GLASMOOG from 16 June to 1 July, 2023, focuses on Senegal's capital Dakar, one of the densest and fastest growing cities in West Africa, where different mobility systems and understandings collide. Here, the colonial legacy of urban segregation and infrastructural neglect affects the daily circulation of dakarois, Dakar’s inhabitants. At the same time, the Train Express Regional (TER) marks the beginning of a new era of mobility. The train line connects the city to a global transportation network and is hailed by many as a pioneering modernization project. Other voices criticize the increase in the cost of mobility and the social exclusion caused by the imported transport system, which displaces local forms and functions of mobility.

The Colliding Circulations exhibition takes up such unequal mobilities in Dakar. Through diagrammatic recordings and scenic interventions, Senegalese artists explore the effects of colonial continuities on urban spaces and spatial circulation, and the processes of mediation and displacement they trigger. For example, Mamadou Diol and Leity Kane, together with the actors from the Kaddu Yaraax Forum Theater, trace the changes brought about by the construction of the TER line, which on the one hand separates the neighborhoods of Hann-Maristes and Hann-Pêcheur from one another, whilst at the same time connecting them to a global mobility system, along with the international airport. They deploy their théâtre de l'opprimé ("theater of the oppressed") as an emancipatory and interactive practice for critical dialog with distressed urban communities and neighborhoods. They translate global dynamics, local lifeworlds, and spatial dissonances of the city into theatrical forms of resistance and resilience. Together, they develop analytical and choreographic tools to describe the production of space under conditions of new interdependencies through large-scale infrastructure systems. 

A workshop and a public talk with Mamadou Diol and Leity Kane of Kaddu Yaraax will be held on May 15 – 19, 2023, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (talk on May 15, 7 p.m.) at the Köln International School of Design of TH Köln, Ubierring 40, 50678 Köln, room 240. Registration is not required.

Colliding Circulations has been conceived by Simon Meienberg with Mamadou Diol and Leity Kane from Kaddu Yaraax, supported by Carolin Höfler and Julian Hoffmann. The exhibition is part of the Curatorial Project of the "connecting – excluding: Cultural Dynamics Beyond Globalized Networks" DFG Research Training Group, a joint project of University of Cologne (UzK), Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM), University of Technology, Arts, Sciences (TH), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).