Boda-Boda Lounge: Transcontinental Video Art Festival

Boda Boda Lounge is a cross-continental video art festival that will take place at over 15 spaces across the African continent from 16–18 November 2018. Boda Boda Lounge is currently accepting video art submissions from artists based in Africa and of African descent. Selected submissions will be put forward for intracontinental screening and exhibition programming.

The Boda Boda Lounge festival is based on the conviction that video art can create exchanges between different contexts in Africa that allow both the transcending of physical boundaries and the creation of an intimate atmosphere for introspection and contemplation.

An English text translated into French and then translated into Xhosa. The same text in Xhosa is then re-translated into English and French. And through language, various contexts and cultures are used to arrive at another imaginary place consequently multiplying mythologies.

This year’s edition titled Soft Pow(ers) is conceptualised by artist Euridice Zaituna Kala. Artists are invited to respond to Édouard Glissant’s notion of Tout Monde (All the world): to deepen and complicate the links amongst the complex African worlds that go beyond the inherited Anglo, Luso and Franco worlds, to creolise rather than hybridise, and to compose a new language within these parameters – that Tout Monde identity, that soft pow(er), that is at times operating covertly. This is a call to reflect on identity not as a single strand or a single truth but one that has been shaped and reshaped by different encounters, resulting in a dynamic identity that is not bound by place especially in this moment where technology temporarily flattens space.

One is therefore confronted by a possible loss of perfect diction – an inability to articulate in one language, when accepting the Tout Monde as each individual finds new ways for the practice of the everyday that is informed by a multitude of contexts. Artists are invited to respond with works that refer to multiple perspectives of the self, their practice and their complex contexts.

About Boda Boda Lounge

The term Boda Boda is an adaptation of the word border and alludes to a cross-border movement, suggesting physical mobility and movement across lines that universally represent the divide of land and space.

Boda Boda Lounge is a continent-wide video art festival and was initiated by the Visual Arts Network of South Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa) and Centre d’art Waza (Lubumbashi, DRC) in 2014. Boda Boda Lounge intends to enable wide access for African artists to be part of the festival and at the same time working with a range of African arts organisations. It is an engagement with low-cost, widely accessible exchange processes on the African Continent. Soft Pow(ers) will be the 3rd edition of the project.

Application requirements:

– Any artist from Africa or the diaspora working in digital and multimedia art can participate
– Works should have been produced in the past 5 years
– Artists can submit a maximum of 3 videos
– Videos should be no longer than 10 minutes
– Each work must be accompanied by a new application form. Download the English application form here.
– Applications can be sent to bodalounge@vansa.co.za by 31 August 2018 (wetransfer/dropbox links are acceptable)