Rhizomes

From 6 February to 16 May 2021, the Bordeaux Submarine Base will present Rhizomes. This exhibition will offer an alternative, subjective and poetic mapping of the modern-day imaginary worlds of 17 artists from Africa and its diaspora who display polymorphic and hybrid practices in this digital era. Rhizomes reflects on how new technologies fit in relation to artistic production, how they influence the latter, and the use of new technologies to re-imagine the present, reflect on the future and (re)contextualise official narratives. Artists are invited to make use of the monumental spaces of the Submarine Base and to reflect on the role of oral tradition in the 21st Century, the ways in which knowledge is developed and disseminated, and they will discuss the major upheavals on current artistic creation that arose out of the advent of the Internet and the digital sphere. Using set ups, sound, music, radio, photography, performances and digital arts, Rhizomes is an invitation to artists whose polymorphic practices are part of a general, futurist and rhizomatic flow, trumping disciplines and aesthetics.

Artists:  Malala Andrialavidrazana (Madagascar), Alun B (Senegal), Baloji (Congo-Belgium), Cesar Schofield Cardoso (Cape Verde), Pedro Coquenão aka Batida (Angola-Portugal), Nolan Oswald Dennis (South Africa), Omar Victor Diop (Senegal), Olalekan Jeyifous (Nigeria), Cyrus Kabiru (Kenya), Selly Raby Kane (Senegal), Grada Kilomba (Portugal), François Knoetze (South Africa), Maurice Mbikayi (Congo), Emo de Medeiros (Benin-France), Mohau Modisakeng (South Africa), Nástio Mosquito (Angola), Joao Orecchia (US-South Africa).

About the Bordeaux Submarine Base: 

The Bordeaux Submarine Base is one of five bases built on the Atlantic coast during the Second World War. The Bordeaux Submarine Base is reinventing itself through the "3 in 1 Base" project – a comprehensive and ambitious cultural project designed for three entities to, ultimately, make use of the Submarine Base’s 41 000m². The exhibition spaces of the Base represent one of the three entities hosting the Rhizomes exhibition and managed by the City Hall of Bordeaux. They are designed to turn the Submarine Base into a platform for cultural and artistic collaborations.

Exhibition commissioner:  Paula Nascimento (Angola)

Paula Nascimento is comissionner of the exhibition, an architect and an independent curator. In 2013, she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for the Angolan pavilion.

--› Her website