An Elegy For An Exile Lost At Sea, Renée Akitelek Mboya

In 2024, La Casa Encendida4 welcomed RAW Material Company to occupy one of its spaces, called ROOM A, in three different phases. The first was a Reading room entitled “May our song be worthy of those who hear it”, curated by Untitled duo (Soukaina Aboulaoula & Yvon Langué), on the practice of RAWAcadémie as an entry point for mapping the initiatives that have transformed the continent in terms of artistic and cultural education - March 09 - June 02.
The second part of this collaboration follows a residency led by curator and film-maker Renée Akitelek Mboya at La Casa Encendida. Entitled ‘An Elegy For An Exile Lost At Sea’, the aim of the residency was to develop a methodology based on the Spanish context, and in particular on the Lavapiés district, which for centuries has been an anchorage point for different generations of migrants... and more recently for the Afro-diasporic community. This neighborhood is also the home of La Casa Encendida, which for over twenty years has been thinking about and building its programming around this place, which has played a major part in shaping the institution's identity. This period of residency, during which Renée encountered the different layers that make up the identity of Lavapiés, gave rise to a number of questions, particularly ethical ones, which led her to slightly move the site and the subject of her research. In particular, she fleshed out her work with layers of audiovisual archives from different sources, challenging the processes of assimilation and the forms of education that preceded them...
An Elegy For An Exile Lost At Sea is a work of speculative documentary using archival material compiled in collaboration with undocumented Senegalese migrants from the Lavapies community in Madrid.
Playing with the notion of the griot, An Elegy For An Exile Lost At Sea instrumentalises and proposes a poetic genealogy of contemporary migrant histories through moving image, photography and sound. Weaving together collective retellings, archival footage, photographs, sound archives, film references from the immediate post-independence period, as well as archival recordings from the Archives Culturelles du Senegal and narratives transmitted through social media (voice notes, video recordings, sermons) in collaboration with often invisible and undocumented storytellers, we prioritise shared retellings as a way of contributing to a contemporary archive of a largely marginalised, criminalised and forgotten population.
Together we worked to develop a database using phono-stylistic techniques that exist in a variety of African cultures - but specifically in the West African and Wolof speaking context (jat, nor nopp, mbabor) as an extension of the memory activism and archival practices of the griots. We hoped to reclaim these practices in the context of communities in exile and in transit.
An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, sometimes used as a catch-all to denote texts of a sombre or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker of textual monumentalisation, and sometimes strictly as a sign of lamentation for the dead.
Vidéo : Zona Cielo Films
Repost: La Casa Encendida
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