An evening of thoughts, poems, songs, and videos, convened by artist Christian Nyampeta, featuring artist Laura Nsengiyumva, composer Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman, and film maker Amelia Umuhire. Co-produced with Contour Biennale 9, Mechelen; in collaboration with Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig; and with the generous support of the Mondriaan Fund.

Artist Christian Nyampeta convenes a scriptorium, a space for “writing,” in which a working group translates Francophone texts of African expression into English. Attention has been given to short texts, songs and films from or related to modern and contemporary Rwandan Thought and life practices. As 2019 marks 25 years since the Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi, this focus contributes with a movement “across” its global meaning today. In some way, the Rwandan Genocide can be read as a metonymy for a wider self-destruction in the world at large, and in the context of the history of Francophone Africa in particular. Despite its own limits and contradictions, the sensibility of the Rwandan visual cultures motions toward a heartwarming intellectual promiscuity: it performs as a thinking hand, fighting against the degradation of life and of living together, but also against the threat to life caused by the disappearance of the habitable environments on our planet.

For this occasion, composer Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman, artist Laura Nsengiyumva and film maker Amélia Umuhire have translated short texts, poems and songs, to be presented in a sequence of narrated fragments that includes supplements reflecting the influences acquired through the artists’s own works, histories, movements, formation and orientations.

The title of the evening is borrowed from A Flower Garden of All Kinds of Loveliness without Sorrow (1668), an encyclopaedic text by Adriaan Koerbagh, a companion of Spinoza and his circle, who lived in exile and died in prison in Amsterdam, owing to the circle’s then transgressive visions of the Radical Enlightenment. Koerbagh conceived A Flower Garden as a dictionary, intervening against the cultural injustice resulting from the distortion of religious and clerical meanings, and in an attempt to demystify their language.

Programme in English

Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan-born Dutch artist. His ongoing activities include the convening of a scriptorium, a roaming programme of exhibitions, screenings and lyrical performances concerned with monuments and translation. He is completing a PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Laura Nsengiyumva is a Belgian artist of Rwandan descent. Her recent contributions include the Contour Biennale 9 in Brussels and Mechelen, and previous exhibitions include the Dak’art Biennale in Dakar, in 2012.

Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman was born in Rwanda, grew up in Belgium and lives in the Netherlands. She is a composer and producer for radio, voice and music, working with a sculptural method for composition that she calls “Afrique Concrète.” She is the recipient of the CTM 2019 Radio Lab in Berlin.

Amelia Umuhire is a German film maker of Rwandan descent. Her recent screenings include the 10th Berlin Biennale in 2018 and at Goethe Institut in Kigali.