In his interview with Rahima Gambo in the education issue of the magazine C& (which you can read here), British-Nigerian photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi describes a basic tension within his approach to photographic education, both his own and that of a younger generation that he mentors. He explains his role in founding the Centers for Learning for Photography in Africa as follows:
The intention was to encourage young practitioners to get a formal photographic education based on a set curriculum and with the intention of becoming professionals.
Akinbiyi explains that such formal training for young African photographers is required given the proliferation of images on the internet, as ‘a visual version of highly toxic fast food’. At the same time, he can see how the internet can ‘afford an insight into serious photography, if used and applied with a sense of purpose’. The question remains, however, whether this ‘sense of purpose’ can be taught in the formal photographic education?
When asked about his own education and the mentoring of others, Akinbiyi refers to a more organic and less formal educational form, but a no less intentional process. He offers an account of his own formation as a photographer as ‘a learning-by-doing process’ and that of his role as mentor as harnessing their innate capacities (their ingenium, as a Classicist may put it):
to gently urge younger colleagues to hear their inner voices, see their inner eye, and taking it from there.
This tension in his pedagogic approach between formal education and photographers to access their capacity through an intentional drive seems to be at work in Akinbiyi’s photographic series, shown at documenta 14, Passageways, Involuntary Narratives, and the Sound of Crowded Spaces, 2015-2017 (examples of which illustrate his C& interview and this post).
In discussing the series in a video interview as part of the education program at the exhibition, Akinbiyi refers to his role as a wanderer in the streets, flowing through the undercurrent. At the same time, he also remarks on seeing structural affinities between his subjects, such as river gods of his Yoruba heritage at a festival in a town in Nigeria, which he wants to visualize in terms of the connections with equivalent German and Greek mythical figures. It is only through his intentional wandering through the undercurrent that he can bring such cross-cultural affinities and relationships to light.
The tension between intention and capacity in Akinbiyi’s account of African photographic education, his own and that of others, is also at work in Anja Bettenworth’s proposed paper on the reception of Saint Augustine in the modern Maghreb for the upcoming Eos workshop Theorizing Africana Receptions at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Classical Studies in San Diego on January 4th, 2019 (for more information on the workshop, go here).
According to her abstract, Bettenworth argues that even though the discipline of Classics locates the textual fragment and the material remains at the heart of its intention to recover the past, modern authors of the Maghreb (including novelists Kebir Ammi* and Abdelaziz Ferrah) engage with their ancient ancestor, Saint Augustine, in a markedly different way. These authors, Bettenworth proposes, privilege their capacity to converse with the past (their past) by being able to ‘see’ directly through time to Augustine, unmediated by the accumulations and systems of fragmentation and material remains that surround them in modern North Africa.
Furthermore, Bettenworth claims that it is through their capacity to approach their past in this way – and this is for me to most exciting part of her argument in the abstract – these modern Maghreb authors’ engagement with Augustine resists both the nationalist discourses of French colonial rule (and presumably its engagement with antiquity) and post-colonial Algeria (in its privileged of Islamic knowledge and culture over the classical Western models).
Beyond a comparison with Akinbiyi’s focus on capacity within intentional photographic education, Bettenworth’s project could be read alongside another essay in the C& issue on education. In their piece ‘After Orientalism’, Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa and Salma Lahlou turn to the Group of Casablanca, which in the mid-1960s pioneered an innovative art education that rejected Western traditions of easel painting. Yet, for me, focused as I am on documenta 14 and its legacies, I am reminded of another Maghrebian artist, the Algerian filmmaker Narimane Mari. In fact, stills of her 2017 film, commissioned by documenta 14, Le fort des fous, which engages with French colonialism directly, have already been framing this post so far. (I sadly didn’t make it to see the screening of the film in Kassel at the incredible venue of the Ballhaus palace, a bus ride from the city center – although, as you can see from the image on the cover of this post, I did at least get so far as to buy a bus ticket!).
Again in one of the artist interviews for the aneducation program, as if acting as an audio-visual expansion of the education issue of C&, we learn of the artist’s own education and her attitudes towards the education of others. You can watch her interview below, but what stood out to me was how she left school at the age of 15, moving from Algeria to France, but because of her minimal education couldn’t get into a photography school in Paris. Furthermore, she describes how in her debut film, Bloody Beans (2013), she cast a group of Algerian boys who too lacked a higher level of education. For both herself and the boys, however, she challenges to interviewer (and the audiences of her film) to claim that they are not intelligent – it is the nature of their (and her) unschooled intelligence that she emphasizes (and the process of working on the film together as an unconventional educational setting). In fact, she sides with them on their answer to the question posed in the film by Antonin Artaud: “Is it better to be or to obey?”.
So to end with some questions. For Anja Bettenworth and the other panelists at the Eos workshop: does the field of Classical Reception Studies in general, and that of Africana receptions in particular, challenge formal educational instruction? If so, how does this work in the academic setting of the SCS conference? Can it highlight alternative modes of learning that align more with the capacity of young people in general or do they already have to have the intention of becoming professional Classicists? And for readers of C&: how can African and diaspora artists and institutions incorporate the idea of innate capacity within the need for formal schools of arts learning across the continent? And, finally, for all of us, when we thematize our own formation in terms of intention, capacity and instruction, what kind of stories are we telling (and to whom)?
* I have sitting on my bookshelf, from my years of working on Apuleius of Madauros, Kebir Ammi’s 2006 novel Apulée, mon éditrice et moi (written 7 years after the author’s novel about Augustine). I have never read it, but wonder how it would fit in with or extend Bettenworth’s argument?