Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

244 Okwui Enwezor
its corollary, creativity, to probe the relationship between the aesthetic and
the ethical, the social and cultural. However, the task Huit Facettes set for
itself was Wrst a confrontation with the impotency, immobility, and disempowerment
that the artists in the collective perceived in the artistic context
of Senegal. The second question that concerned members of Huit Facettes
was the increasing social stratiWcation that deWned the relationship between
the elite and the poor in the city, a stratiWcation that also had impoverished
the relationship of their individual work to the society in which it was produced,
leading it inexorably toward becoming a code for its own alienation.
This stratiWcation and alienation is even more acute in the lines that separate
rural and urban communities in Senegal. In the city, the terms of dwelling
and perceptions of social agency are often aleatory. While the urban
economy is governed by a tendency toward informality and improvisation
within the capitalist economy, the rural community is entirely tethered to a
preindustrial agrarian past. In the city social networks that bind one community
to another have not only exploded, producing scattered trajectories,
they have also become implacable, diffuse, and difWcult to organize. The urban
material consistency, having succumbed to obsolescence, is now shaped by
growing spatial distortions that collapse into Xeeting temporalities.
On the vast outskirts of the urban rim, forgotten communities in
the villages that are the historical link between the past and the present,
the local and global, live on the edge of ofWcial amnesia, on the dark side of
a politics of invisibility. 34 Though massive in population and visible through
the meager, deracinated social amenities that can barely cope with their
demands, the poor in Africa have become the disappeared of globalization.
In broad daylight Africans are short-circuited between development and
underdevelopment, between the third world and the Wrst world. The poor are
invisible because ofWcial discourse long ago stopped seeing them. Instead they
have become a blind spot in the neoliberal catechism of the move toward
market economy. They have become ghosts in the political machine 35 of late
modernity. Deracinated by structural adjustment policies, the rural and urban
contexts in Africa have become manifestations that produce their own structure
of fecundation, a fertile soil for new possibilities of being. Urban and
rural inhabitants have increasingly begun working with new kinds of experimentation
contra the logic of development modernity. They are involved
in inventing new subjective identities and protocols of community.
All these issues coalesce in the activities of Huit Facettes. Its principal
project since its formation is the Hamdallaye project, a long, extended
collaboration with the inhabitants of the village of Hamdallaye, some Wve
hundred kilometers from Dakar in the Haute Cassamance region near the
Gambian border. Huit Facettes perceives its work exactly as the inverse of