With the meeting and activities lasting ten days, from 2 to 12 June in Nairobi, the intercultural exchange project between Italian and Kenyan artists "Dialogos Part Six" got under way. It brought together Italian artists and researchers with Kenyan colleagues to develop creativity and common themes and to arrive, through further in-person and remote meetings, at a collective work, a publication documenting the entire project and a public presentation in Nairobi.
Italians Beatrice Polato, Umberto Cavenago, Giancarlo Norese, Luisa Turuani and the Kenyan "Un-Collective", formed by artists Onyis Martin, Longinos Nagila and David Thuku, interacted with other colleagues online from the Kuona Art creative workshop in the capital, one of the partners of the initiative coordinated by the Italian Cultural Institute in Nairobi.
As the initiative's website states, 'Dialogos Part Six is a collaborative project between Kenyan and Italian artists, focused on the possibility of developing an artistic practice based on the continuous negotiation of knowledge, choices and awareness. A flourishing experience between artists who have found each other through coincidence, elective affinities or intertwined trajectories'.
Three Italian artists and a researcher will experience being together as an art project in a culturally distant territory. They will dialogue with other Kenyan artists who will also act as a bridge in discovering the art scene mainly concentrated in Nairobi.
Thanks to the collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute and their willingness to support the organisation of the residency in Kenya, it has been possible to realise this cultural exchange, declined through contemporary art.
The participating Italian artists are linked by the sharing of a project that boasts a decades-long history in Italy, Dialogos, which places at the centre of the creative process and of making art not necessarily something tangible as a result but aesthetic dialogue, with the declared objective of making Kenya known through the people who live there and who are committed to promoting a less stereotypical narrative of their country. Sharing social and environmental issues that art expresses and sometimes denounces, in Kenya as well as in Italy.
The Nairobi initiative is therefore a work in progress, a format of artistic sharing to be put into dialogue with a culturally diverse country that ignites curiosity, debates and provokes cross-narratives in the hope of creating a common ground to build on.
A space within Kuona Art Collective will thus be transformed into a sort of atelier for artistic creation where three other Kenyan artists, Onys Martin, Longinos Nagila, David Thuku and various figures who in different capacities will want to contribute to the exchange within the residency will meet. From there, the journey will begin, becoming at the same time a testimony, a documentation and a work of art.
The common themes explored by both the Italian and Kenyan artists are: The concept of time and space as categories to be included within the debate related also to the meaning of displacement, the concept of place understood also as environmental attention and the concept of limit.
The questions that will emerge during the residency, even more than the answers, will be material to be collected and left as a testimony of an intercultural encounter and a legacy to be taken up.