• Fri 02 06 2023 / 6 – 9 pm •
Xarassi Xanne - Crossing Voices Raphaël Grisey / Bouba Touré

WITH RAPHAËL GRISEY, OLIVIER MARBOEUF, SOSO SOUMARÉ
MODERATED BY AMINATA DIOUF,AGNES STILLGER

Using rare cinematic, photographic and sound archives, Crossing Voices recounts the exemplary adventure of Somankidi Coura, an agricultural cooperative created in Mali in 1977 by western African immigrant workers living in workers’ residences in France. The story of this improbable, utopic return to the homeland follows a winding path that travels through the ecological challenges and conflicts on the African continent from the 1970s to the present day. To tell this story, Bouba Touré, one of its principal actors, returns to the heart of his personal archives. They document peasant struggles in France and Mali as well as following the personal stories of migrant workers over many decades. Furthermore, the film is a story of transmission, kinship and cinematographic geographies. It is the story of Bouba Touré with filmmaker Raphaël Grisey, who became Bouba’s spiritual son, but it also chronicles Bouba’s relationship with militant filmmakers such as Sidney Sokhona or Med Hondo. Throughout the film, voices come to accompany Bouba and bring forth the narrative of a forgotten memory leading towards the future. Over the course of the film, different voices enter the sound-scape to accompany Bouba Touré’s voice; they bring the tale of a forgotten memory toward a possible future sung by an electronic griot storyteller.

Fri 02 06 2023 | 18:00-21:00
Screening with english subtitles
Talk in french and german
Filmhaus, Maybachstraße 111, 50670 Köln
Free entry

The Film-Screening is part of the exhibition “My Life Began Several Centuries Ago” - An Ecosystem of Circulating Images. A cooperation of the DFG Research Training Group "connecting – excluding" Cultural Dynamics Beyond Globalized Networks and the Academy of the Arts of the World (Akademie der Künste der Welt, ADKDW) with African Futures Cologne. Funded by the German Research Foundation.