Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive is a long-term research endeavor by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré , around the photographic archive of Bouba Touré, and around the permacultures and history of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized agricultural cooperative along the Senegal river founded by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977 after the Sahel famines of he early 1970s. Sowing Somankidi Coura unfolds and generates cine-geographies that reveal the boundaries between the liberation struggles of migrant workers in France, the Pan-African history of the cooperative, and potentialities of decolonial agro-ecologies.
Through a practice of filmmaking, archiving, exhibitions, publication, workshop and theatre, Sowing Somankidi Coura, engages in the articulation of liberation narratives, collective care and peasant alliances towards a denaturalisation and decolonization of development politics.
The research navigates the liaisons across situated knowledges, agro-pastoral ecosystems; hetero-temporalities; affinities between soils, plants, animals and farming technologies; archives and reservoirs. Deploying diverse modes of image circulation, the work aimed at resisting forces of erosion, determination, national migration management politics, and the patenting of agro-industries.
More information: Raphaël Grisey