 So, hi everyone. Good evening. My name is Antoine Byrd. I'm an Associate Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago and an Assistant Professor in Art History at Northwestern University. Today I have the great pleasure of being in conversation with Oyenda Mola Fakaye, who's the Director of the Center for Contemporary Art and Lagos. At present, Oyenda is in Slovenia, which means that by the time we finish it'll be Friday for her, because I think it's 11.45 there, no? 11.30. Okay. All right, so today, Oyenda and I, we want to talk about an initiative that we both worked on at different points in our professional development. In 2009, I moved to Lagos and I was doing research as a Fulbright Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Art, which was an alternative art space that was established by a pioneer and curator named B.C. Silva. And it was opened in 2007 and the program or the institute or the center was premised on providing opportunities for contemporary African artists to experiment with lens-based media, also publishing programs, performance, installation, modes of practice that one could consider at that time alternative, in part because they weren't promoted by a lot of the art academies at the universities. And so when I got to Lagos in 2009, I immediately met Oyenda and she was there also working under B.C. Silva. She's working as a curatorial assistant and the two of us developed a really close friendship and a working relationship. Most recently, we co-curated the Lagos Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2019 and we've had the pleasure of working together in other ways as well. Today, we want to talk about collective learning and how collective learning has shaped our professional and ideological outlook as it relates to art. And one of the ways that we're going to talk about it is through a specific program called ASIKO. ASIKO, a Yoruba word meaning time, and it's the name that B.C. Silva gave to an alternative pedagogical program that she developed in Lagos at CCA in 2010. And I had the pleasure of working on the first edition of the program and Oyenda led the most recent edition of the program. And so we thought I'd start by giving you some background on the history of this program and how it seeks to develop collective learning practices. And then from there, Oyenda will take over and speak about the most recent iteration. Is that cool? Yeah? Very cool. Oh, and I should say also that I have the great pleasure of being the first presentation that's via Zoom. And so if you see me looking this way or this way, it's because there are multiple cameras. So ASIKO, the first edition of the program began in 2010 and it coincided with the 50th year anniversary of Nigeria's independence from British rule. And B.C. at the time was really interested in trying to develop an alternative opportunity for young emerging artists to collaborate and network with artists within their own city, but also opportunities for them to move outside of Lagos and interact with artists in other cities. At the time, B.C. was incredibly conscious of the impact of Biennales like the Bamako Biennale and the Dakar Biennale and how those platforms provided opportunities for artists to organically interact with one another. And yet at the same time, she was also aware of the stagnating sort of curriculum in a lot of the universities in Nigeria in particular. She would often talk about how, in some cases, if you went into an arts program, students would be learning based on a curriculum that was 30 or 40 years old. And so for her, that really spoke to some of the limitations of a kind of post-colonial education system. Not only in West Africa, but in other regions of the continent. And also I could say that a similar dynamic played out in many Caribbean nations, for example. The Trinidadian artist Christopher Cosier often talks about how, you know, Eric Williams, the first president, prime minister, would speak publicly about how the future of the nation lied in the school bags of children. And yet at the same time, many of the educational opportunities there didn't allow artists to explore creative practices with the sort of freedom that we tend to associate in the West. And so I think there was a similar dynamic that motivated the work that BC wanted to do. So for the first edition of ASICO, she titled it On Independence and the Abivalence of Promise. And so this idea that in the wake of political emancipation, that education could become one of the opportunities for the nation to develop and prove itself determination. But in the case of art, that wasn't the case. BC was conscious of the really, really robust impact of programs like the Embari and Bayou Club that Uli Bayer founded in Nigeria during the mid-20th century. But she was also conscious of other sort of collective programs like POTO, POTO, the painting school, and the Congo. And so with these sort of presidents in mind, and also she was interested in, you know, models like Die Appel and the Netherlands, and also the Rijks Academy, she set out to produce what she described as an alternative education that was part residency, part laboratory, and part school. And she was insistent on segmenting the program across these different categories. In some cases it would be more laboratory and in some cases it would be more school. But that ultimately depended on the makeup of the cohort of students that were participating. Each edition of ASICO tended to have between 15 and 25 students from different parts of the continent. And the program often ran for about 35 days. And so the initial edition occurred in Lagos and that's the one that I had the pleasure of working on as a program coordinator. For the first edition it was open exclusively to photographers and then subsequently it expanded and it began to invite artists working in a range of different media, but also curators. And in the sessions, the ASICO sessions, participants were being taught by a roving roster of facilitators. Artists, curators, historians, philosophers from different regions on the continent and also from throughout the diaspora. And so by the end of the course, the participants had access to a range of scholars and thinkers that they may not otherwise have had access to. And I think it's also interesting to note that 2010, when the first edition began, it coincided with the launch of Instagram. So prior to that, Instagram wasn't the tool that we tend to associate with it today in terms of networking and having access to practices that are happening in different regions of the world. And so as ASICO began to evolve, BC was really interested in having it be grounded on the continent, but also be responsive to trends and trajectories and contemporary art practices happening in other regions of the world. And so by bringing artists and bringing facilitators to Lagos or to Dakar or to Mozambique in Maputo or Adi Sababa in Ethiopia, artists and facilitators were not only able to develop an engagement with the local cities in which they were in mesh, but also drawn the resources in those cities. And so that was one of the ways that she conceived of collective learning, that there's no specific schoolhouse or classroom that's going to be the focal point for the entire 35 day of the program, but rather day one maybe in this museum, day two maybe in someone's living room, day three maybe in a gallery. And so each day, participants are experiencing different aspects of the city. And so now I want to turn it over to Olinda to speak a bit about the most recent iteration of ASICO. Thanks, Antoine. Thanks for laying the foundation. The most recent addition of ASICO took place in prior in 2022. The prior edition was actually something that Bissy had initiated and was due to hold in 2017, sorry 2018, while she was ill. And so it couldn't hold. And so for us, it was very important that we honoured Bissy by running this edition and almost closing well or ending well, you know, the run and the additions that she had kind of put together, posted together. So the edition of prior prior is an island off the coast of West Africa, that really had no history that preceded colonialism. It was an empty island that was colored that was colonised and its population was made up of the slavers and, you know, members from mainland Africa. And so the thematics for this year, 2022 was around the poetics of place. And as prior is actually or Cape Verde is known as a space piece of emigration where most of their population is actually in the diaspora. So for the first time, we actually opened up the school to people in diaspora. So I don't think Antoine had mentioned this, but as a premise, the school was designed for participants on the continent solely because of the lack of access to this type of education. But because prior and Cape Verde had such a large diaspora community and was engaging quite a lot with its diaspora, we decided to open it up and we invited three participants from the diaspora to come and engage in the project. We actually decided to start off in Dakar, Senegal, because it was the Dakart Biennial, and we saw that as an opportunity. So as Antoine mentioned, festivals and arts events are a great place for people to come together. And we saw this as an opportunity because people would be coming together from Africa, but also internationally. And we wanted to invite our participants to take that learning from being on a by being attending on a by a biennial, especially one, as established as Dakart. So we kicked off the activities at the Dakart Biennial and Mega Ratapati, who is also in the audience and who's part of CC was one of our speakers before moving to prior for three weeks. Now, proceeding COVID, the project was around five to six weeks. But because we were planning and delivering the project, during a very uncertain time, we weren't sure how long we could run it for, we ended up running it for only three weeks. But I have to say that, you know, we tried to embody everything that Antoine said in the way we designed the course, you know, the work site visits. We invited historians, sociologists to really make sure that we were grounding ourselves in the space. And we even spent time in a constant in what, you know, they have a concentration camp to anchor ourselves in the place. What was I think was really exciting about this last edition was that on the tail end of it, we had a group of ladies come together and create a collective called I continue to continue. And I think that the fact that the the project was delivered, and it is delivered as a cobalt, but then for the artists to come together and actually decide to, you know, embody the experience of working together and to go on to create projects together, post the program is something that I was really happy to see. In terms of the working together element, you know, busy was already drawing from other pedagogies during the initial stage is so between 2012 and 2014, we were working with the growth global crit lab. Sorry, the global crit clinic, which was initiated by Kianga Ford and Shane as land cells are and really helped to shape the initial program. And more recently, we are working with University of Finland, University of Arts Finland, and thinking through research, and how to further develop this type of education on the continent. Thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you.