After a rewarding sabbatical year RAW Material Company resumes its work with the launch of a new strategic programme centered around education, residencies and publishing.

This reinforced focus is the result of a thorough assessment of our work over the past five years. It will complement the various formats of action carried out until now that include exhibitions, lectures, artists/curators talks, international collaborations, commissioning as well as collection advisory.

RAW Academy is a residential experimental study programme for artistic and curatorial thought and practice inquiry of eight weeks in Dakar. It is dedicated to a lively reflection on artistic research, curatorial practice and critical writing. The academy is held during two distinctive sessions per year; October–December and April–June. Each session is directed by a Lead Faculty that has displayed an off-the-beaten-paths practice in regards to artistic, curatorial and critical imagination. Session 1 will be led by Beirut based independent curator and critic Rasha Salti. It will take place from October 24–December 11, 2016.

RAW Academy exposes participating fellows and Lead Faculty to the contemporary critical and dynamic artistic environment of Dakar as well as its history, while providing them with a free space for exploration, investigation, research and production of their own ideas. The programme is designed to promote intense exchange and continuous dialogue organized around public and closed sessions that include seminars, presentations, research and practice time, and visits of cultural institutions. Exhibitions and publications will be elaborated within this context for production and execution at a later stage. Each academy session is built around a relevant conceptual framework developed by the Lead Faculty with contributions of invited fellow professionals. The conceptual framework is a compelling basis for the analysis and production of the fellows’ as well as the faculty’s work and areas of inquiry. The Lead faculty has the absolute freedom for the conception of her/his project for the session.

Session 1: Hunger Incorporated
This session proposes to engage critically with the present-day global neoliberal regime of production of excesses and conditions of extremeness, with a focus on the realities at play on the African continent while using the economies of natural resources as its investigative thread. « Hunger Incorporated » refers to the right to basic sustenance and the threat of lack of access to nutrition, the hunger for resources resulting from exponential economic growth, hunger as a constant craving and the relentless inability for satiation, hunger as blind ambition, hunger as the impetus for compensating a lack or lag, hunger as compulsive accumulation and the stand-in for utopia, and hunger as one the allegorical and sublimated manifestations of anxiety. It also refers to the market-driven economic regime’s systemic production of needs, conditioning and control within the logic of neo-liberal capital, from the anxiety of the quotidian relationship to the real, to the looming superlative promise of dystopia. While economies of extraction, processing and transport of oil, coal, metals and minerals have been the constitutional marrow of 20th and 21st century capitalism, their economies have been notably abstracted from visibility, representation and narrative, rigs and mines are often cordoned with stringent policing. Session 1 will plumb this constellation of questions, themes and representations through a series of seminars, presentations, curatorial research, artistic productions, critical writing, film screenings and exhibition reviews. Contributing faculty include filmmakers Newton Aduaka, Ghassan Salhab and Carine Doumit, artists Ursula Biemann and Alfredo Jaar, and art historian Patricia Falguières.

About Rasha Salti
Rasha Salti is a Beirut based independent film and visual arts curator and writer. She co-curated The Road to Damascus, with Richard Peña, a retrospective of Syrian cinema that toured worldwide (2006), and Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s until Now, with Jytte Jensen (2010–12) showcased at the MoMA in New York. She was one of co-curators of the 10th edition of the Sharjah Biennial in 2011. She co-curated with Kristine Khouri Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the Exhibition of International Art for Palestine (Beirut, 1978), at the MACBA, Barcelona, in 2015 and at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 2016. Salti edited Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Filmmakers (2006, ArteEast and Rattapallax Press), Beirut Bereft, The Architecture of the Forsaken and Map of the Derelict, a collaboration with photographer Ziad Antar (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2010), and I Would Have Smiled: A Tribute to Myrtle Winter-Chaumeny co-edited with Issam Nassar, in 2010. In co-curation with Koyo Kouoh, Salti is working on Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, a research, exhibition and publication project to be held accross multiple institutions in late 2017.

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Application process

RAW Academy is a tuition free experimental study programme. Ideal fellows are young graduates from art schools, curatorial programmes and humanities. The application process is online only. The selection committee for Session 1 is made of:

Rasha Salti, Lead Faculty Session 1 RAW Academy
Koyo Kouoh, Artistic Director RAW Material Company
Eva Barois De Caevel, Assistant Curator & Academy Coordinator RAW Material Company

A maximum of eight to ten international fellows are selected for each session. The application process for Session 1 opens on May 28, 2016 and closes on July 3, 2016. Only the first 100 applications will be considered for review. Only selected applicants will be notified and invited for online interview. Apply here.

Contact: Eva Barois De Caevel – curatorial@rawmaterialcompany.org

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www.rawmaterialcompany.org