Christian Nyampeta, Words After the World

Join us with artist Christian Nyampeta for an evening of videos, sounds, and recipes, starting with the trailer of Sometimes It Was Beautiful (2018), commissioned by Maria Lind at Tensta Konsthall; followed by Words After the World (2017); and extending with a live streaming of Radius, an online and occasionally inhabitable radio station.

The film Words After the World was developed during a working period at Camden Arts Centre, in which Nyampeta convened a scriptorium, a working group established to translate historical Francophone texts. The scriptorium focused on the work of Abbé Alexis Kagame, one of the earliest contemporary African philosophers emerging from south of the Sahara. This collective structure informed the script for Words after the World, a short fiction about a writer attempting to draft a novella at a time when the use of existing words is restricted by copyright. The version of Words after the World at Bar Laika includes new dialogues issued from ongoing translations, which are added to the film as they become available.

Before and after the screenings, Radius channel plays the evening’s soundtrack, with songs, narrations, and poems related to Nyampeta’s films. The menu for the evening is conceived in collaboration with writer Mary Wang. It features bread recipes prepared with Argo, a one-year-old live culture.

For more information, contact laika@e-flux.com.