In 2022 German agency Piranha Arts, in collaboration with Nyege Nyege, funded 2, 6 week residencies, one in Kampala, Uganda, another in Hamburg, Germany, bringing together over 30 artists from various regions of Africa and Europe. The goal was to promote artistic, social, and cultural pollination by facilitating creative encounters between artists, genres, disciplines, by deconstructing sounds and ideas to re-appropriate and re-purpose them.
An ambitious but worthy endeavour spanning both hemispheres, many languages, and full of beauty and challenges. This is the story of the artists and actors involved, and the creative power of cross-cultural residency programs.
When Nyege Nyege meets Piranha Arts
Two of the global music scene’s creative actors came together to bring the residency mission to life. First, Nyege Nyege, a Ugandan based collective that has been giving audiences the “uncontrollable urge to dance” since its founding in 2013. A record label, booking agency, and festival organizer, Nyege Nyege has been pushing hardcore noise around the world both at their local festival along the Nile and across the electronic avant-garde’s most prestigious stages.
Nyege Nyege and its roster of 50 artists teamed up with Piranha Arts, a Berlin independent creative agency, after meeting at the 2022 WOMEX exposition in Portugal. Known for the Karneval der Kulturen in Berlin, Piranha Arts has hosted the million strong annual street parade since 1996. The group also pilots the WOMEX music showcase, conference and expo and runs the independent record & publishing label Piranha. It’s a match of like-minded structures pushing culture forward.
A roster of artists were selected by Nyege Nyege from both within their record label and across the German electronic landscape. Both the CTM music festival and COSMO public radio gave some light input, and Cameroon’s Yoké Collective also contributed to the selection of artists to include a dance and performance element into the multidisciplinary experience.
Groups are made, schedules are layed out, planes, trains, and buses are boarded heading for Kampala or Hambourg. No specific final products are defined, collaborative groups are either self initiated or suggested, but the constraints of the residency are manifest in the faces and spaces.
In this case, a pink villa, and a repurposed German warship.
Inside the villa and aboard the Stubnitz
Hidden down a small dirt road on the edge of Kampala is the Nyege Nyege villa. Inside the pink concrete walls is a series of bedrooms, studios, workspaces and living quarters. The walls are plastered with posters of former parties or iconic in-house records. In the middle sits a “war room” splattered with machines, microphones and adapters, where the Nyege team makes plans, sits in wait, or furiously scribbles to-do’s onto a whiteboard.
The space buzzes with noise and energy. A mix of language and habits, character and customs, flow in and around, often finishing with a nighttime drum circle, or a jet across the road to the local drinkery. The sunsets are sweet in Kampala. Moist air ruffles the heavy fronds and the gentle hum of a passing boda (scooter taxi) talks to the tiring birds. Beneath doorways, far into the night, you can see the soft glow of monitors and hear the muffled beats of artists working out the incessant inspiration.
Here, the artists work together on a chaotic schedule, music bursting from the rooms, tagalongs coming in and out with questions and ideas and an occasional respite beneath the shade of a ficus tree. “It’s pretty intense work, but it’s enriching,” explains Pauline Bedarida aka PÖ, a French-Ghanian artist and DJ, longtime Nyege Nyege collaborator, and Afropollination Swiss army knife. “Seeing everyone together here in this place… it’s like family.”
For summer 2022 this is Phase 1’s home base. It’s where artists will come and go. Projects will take their initial shape. All awaiting the explosion of beauty and chaos which would come to be the Nyege Nyege Festival at Itanda Falls.
On the other side of the world, sitting along the Elbe river in Hambourg, is the Motorship Stubnitz; an 80 meters long ex East German fishing vessel transformed in 1992 into a moving platform for cultural research and exchange.
Weighing in at over two and half thousand tons, the Stubnitz, a “roving neutral venue”, travels from its homeport Rostock around the Baltic and North Sea, networking with cities such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Newcastle , Hamburg, St. Petersburg, and London.
With space for shows, studios, and living quarters, the Stubnitz takes its residents out of time and into another world. Rack and pinion doors seal the noise. Steps make a hollow clank on polymer floors and the whisper of steam pipes and control valves provide a keynote to the soundscape.
The boat rises from the water on four levels. Three levels are dedicated to cabins and living quarters with bunk beds and modest work desks. In the middle is a kitchen and dining room equipped with a French chef that works busily to feed the non-circadian appetites. Here, the artists gather and break bread, laugh or sit with tired eyes.
Elsewhere one can find rehearsal rooms and work spaces. Stubnitz volunteers maintain production studios and practice venues. A “floating villa” as many joke.
Into the belly of the industrial labyrinth is a great room used for concerts and events. A stage faces a dancefloor, edged around by stairs and rafters where partygoers come to lock themselves into the nautical moment. A massive space formerly used to store fish for long voyages out at sea, now the cooling pipes that surround the room serve as column acoustics. Squeezed away in these odd shapes is where the Phase 2 of the residency takes place. Ideas more masticated, dates in Berlin approaching, and a sense of residence fully in place.
Between frigid cold and tropical heat. The scene is set, camp is made. Now comes the good work of creation.
Time to pollinate
The artists are brought together, but working across disciplines, cultural barriers, and often language, is no easy feat. It takes a sense of trust, patience and conviction in the benefit of collaboration. For this group, living in close proximity, expressing and experiencing each other’s work first hand, the foundation was laid for a deep integration of creative hearts and minds. But challenges remain. Knowledge is bound. And it takes the knitty-gritty path of daily effort to traverse those lumps in the road.
For some the process is natural. Franco-Malian, Berlin-based artist Astan Ka paired with Rwandan multi-disciplinary artist Binghi during the Afropollination program. Both have an Afrofuturist vision bent alternatively to each’s experience.
On stage, the two performed at both Nyege Nyege (with the help of Thelma Ndebele aka Dormant Youth) in Uganda and aboard the Stubnitz. The vocal universe of Astan Ka and the thumping space of Binghi’s productions create an expansive world.
More than a singer, Astan Ka is a member of Berlin’s Sonic Interventions collective and a creative visionary for “gangsta jazz”, a genre coined by Astan herself. When not performing for the band Asphalt Djelis, Astan is self-releasing work like her single “Charcoal”, rapping and singing in both French and English.
Binghi is also a multi-talent. A self taught music producer exploring spiritual drum patterns, a DJ, and a visual artist, there’s a vast creative well for her to tap into. Binghi also starred in the cult film Neptune Frost which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival; a film which looks like much of Binghi’s music might sound.
More than collaborators, the two are friends. Working in lockstep with joy and passion. During their time, the two produced and released a single entitled “Sacred Forest”. Notions of the natural and sacred are essential in both artists’ creative vocabulary. This is an example of when residencies flow like water through existing inlets.
Leaving the comfort zone
But convergence isn’t always guaranteed. Sometimes one needs to carve the earth, and build a canal. For the residency duo of Afrorack, real name Bryan Bayana, and Jessica Ekomane, there was a greater chasm to cross.
Afrorack is a maverick. A Ugandan native, he built one of Africa’s first DIY modular synthesizers. Born of a personal curiosity, Afrorack would forage around repair shops, compile tutorials and read circuit diagrams on the the internet in order to build his musical machines.
The result is a singular form of “African acid-house”. Using the electronic sounds of the synths and the complex rhythms of his native Uganda, he is able to synthesize a new form of club music all his own.
“Our heritage does not come from Detroit, Chicago or Berlin – but from our own musical traditions. I am convinced that the next electronic music revolution will take place in Africa,” Afrorack told Pan African Music back in 2018.
On the other hand is Jessica Ekomane. Jessica is a French-Cameroonian, Berlin-based electronic musician and sound artist. Interested in mathematics, physics, and the nonlinear passage of time, Jessica’s performances and productions are ambient and cathartic. Each composition contains numerous sound events that are different from each other, passing seamlessly or abruptly between textures.
With two singular artists, each with an imposing aesthetic and identity, the process of collaboration takes more energy and more compromise.
Whether the fruits of a residency are bitter or sweet, the seeds within remain. A cross-pollination is inevitable, and each artist can walk away with a more refined idea of their own craft and a greater understanding of other paths not taken.
A statue of parts
For others the residency is a window into the unlikely engagements between far-off creatives. Take the trio of DJ Diaki, Zoe Mc Pherson, and Jay Mitta. One, a balani innovator, the other, a Berlin techno maverick, and the third Tanzanian singeli music pioneer.
If there’s anything these artists have in common it’s the relentless pulsating rhythm of dance. And speed. Lots of speed.
The synthesized balafon music that DJ Diaki helped make famous from his Malian home country is high energy madness. Emerging in the late 90s in the capital city of Bamako, Diaki and his contemporaries were able to recreate troupes of 10-12 musicians on touch pads, synths and DAWs. The result is a gritty electronic version of this trance inducing dance music that plays with the traditional balafon, but also elements of kuduro and coupé-decalé.
Far to the South East, singeli music is the modern solution to taraab, with a taste for heavier, chunkier beats to dance and twerk to. Jay Mitta, who came up in Sisso Studios, one of the legendary singeli workshops tied to Nyege Nyege, is carrying the torch for the endless rhythms and performative displays of this emergent sensation. Classics like Mitta’s 2018 Tatizo Pesa have become part of a soundtrack to the youth-led, block party-style movement that singeli embodies.
Slap it together with the complex textures of French-Irish, Berlin-based spatial sound shaper Zoe Mc Pherson and her tastemaker techno and you have a mutant creation of explosive sound.
If you’re into pyrotechnics and polyrhythms this amalgamation is an obvious intrigue. Those braced and brave can roll into the chaos with a psychedelic appreciation. The artists themselves certainly didn’t come out unscathed by the maddening will of each’s genre.
Techno-balani? Future singeli? The volcanic features of triple influence are yet to be determined. But whether it’s a synthesis of Afro-futurist visions, theoretic conflict between sound scientists, or collabs between mind bending super-troupes, the sum is a work of art, a statue of parts.
Letting things bloom
Though true collaboration isn’t just throwing things against a wall to see what sticks. There must be a deliberate approach to sharing knowledge. Which isn’t always symbiotic. At times, information must be explicit, didactic and pedagogical. Assumptions must be exorcized and artists need to become teachers of their craft, culture, and vision.
While aboard the Stubnitz, Afropollination organized a series of workshops to allow artists to express their craft to other participants and the wider community.
Menzi, a pioneer of South Africa’s gqom music, hosted one such workshop.
A Durban native, Menzi has been on the forefront of South Africa’s dark and deep club music, gqom. It’s a sound that evokes maleficent spirits and the ominous supernatural. “Scary in an exciting way,” says Menzi to the workshop audience.
Less understood and less trendy than its jazzy, housey counterpart, amapiano, gqom has a unique power within its muffled howls and shattering bass to move global club audiences.
In Hambourg, Menzi took the time to explain the origins of gqom and how he as a producer perceives its sound. Hooking up his computer, Menzi projected the columns and rows of sound that are the ingredients to gqom. Running through its outsider origins on cracked fruity loops software, it was a chance for the curious few to decrypt this darkside music.
For the Afropollination experience, Menzi was paired with French producer Debmaster. A prolific artist and producer for some of the most charismatic artists on the Nyege Nyege roster, including MC Yallah and Aunty Rayzor, Debmaster has an experimental approach to hip-hop, 8bit, glitch music, among other left-field sounds.
Knowledge, in all its bits and pieces, was exchanged between the two producers. In its revelation a common thread is found. Often more in a feeling than the mechanics of sound. Then, on to the good work of reverse engineering mouse movements across digital workstations to uncover a universal zeitgeist.
“I think we’ve created a whole new genre,” Debmaster laughs in the phosphorescent lights of the Stubnitz.
Deconstructing singeli
From Dar es Salaam, it was Sisso and Maiko who hosted a workshop of their own to present the aforementioned singeli music. With the help of Nyege Nyege and the prowess of some of its pioneers, including Sisso, and the new school of talent like Maiko, singeli is making waves internationally. Sisso’s Sound of Sisso is an international cult classic, with LPs sold out on tastemaker platforms like NTS.
The joyful melodies and lightning fast beats are dance music at its finest. But upon first listen it’s not the easiest genre to warm up to. Certainly not without the contagious spirit of singeli performers.
Focused as much on the experience as the mechanics, singeli is a music often mixed live with drum samples programmed on computer keyboards. This allows singeli DJs and producers to mix endless tracks with dynamic rhythms, continuing on far into the day and night.
Sisso and Maiko have taken this approach to the next level, often playing the keyboard behind their heads, with their tongue, or blindfolded as they did during the Nyege Nyege festival.
For them, sharing singeli behind the scenes is important. But it’s what’s front and center that the duo opt to highlight. The dancing, the energy, the moment of live performance which strikes at the heart of what singeli has to offer.
Which brings us to the inseparable element for both the residency and music at large… dance.
Making moves
For the residency organizers, interdisciplinary exchange was as important as international exchange. Whether it’s the disciplines within music (producing, DJing, playing, composing) or in broader culture, it’s easy to silo craft into their respective towers of ivory and insight.
But the obvious remains. Music and dance are inseparable. One informs the other. Back and forth in conversation, bodies move to beats and beats move to bodies. For this Afropollination residency, dance was a crucial component to enriching the cross-pollination.
For spectators and participants alike, dance embodied the experience. Often characterized as a “performance”, dance transcended the artistic frontiers of the festivals and residency locations to engage with the larger public.
Under the creative direction of Violaine Le Fur, groups were put together, workshops and movement sessions organized, and spectacular avant-garde performances shared with the world. Creative director of the aforementioned Yoké collective, Violaine works across Africa doing workshops, exhibitions, and cultural events. As a curator within the Nyege Nyege collective, Violaine also participates in the dance and performance programming of the festival and encourages collaborations with other independent African Festivals such as Kinact (DRC), Modaperf (Cameroon) and Balabal’art (Congo Brazzaville).
Pollinating the streets
One such dancer who was brought into the fold was Cameroonian multi-disciplinary artist Zora Snake. During the Nyege Nyege festival, Zora chose to march his performance outside the gates and security controls of the festival as an offering to the locale. Accompanied by the Royal Drummers of Burundi, Congolese dancer Sara N Dele, and the KinAct collective from Kinshasa, Zora’s ultra-futuristic, yet deeply symbolic spectacle was a display of generosity, transcendence, and pure avant-garde.
The recycled monsters who followed Zora are part of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s KinAct collective and festival organizers. Eddy Ekete, the group’s founder, takes trash from the over polluted streets of Kinshasa and transforms the material into works of art. Costumes made of plastic bottles, old car parts, or shards of glass, there is no limit to the recycled potential of their work.
It’s an appropriate metaphor tied to Zora Snake’s performance which “recycles” symbolism and tradition often thrown away or overlooked, creating modern reinterpretation in the form of ritualistic dance.
A similar performance took place with other dancers in Kampala’s Ggaba Fish Market near the Nyege Nyege villa. This makeshift dance outfit including Sara N Dele, Fanny Love, and Shanny J all made their way into the public to introduce the magic of their art to unsuspecting samaritans.
It’s a prestigious crew. Fanny Love is a Cameroonian dancer who has worked with international choreographers, won local dance battles, and became an Africa’s Got Talent finalist. Sara N Dele is a longtime Kinact collaborator and member of Kinshasa’s Academy of Fine Arts. And Fanny J is a renowned waacker, voguer and backup dancer for the likes of Meek Mill, Boity, or Kamo Mphela.
Zora begins with another ritualistic offering. Sara sheds one of the KinAct costumes, reaching for the clouded sky. Fanny Love splashes in and out of an oil drum filled with water. Shanny J, moves in the shapes of a recovered tent and hula hoop leftover from the Nyege Nyege festival. Sisso and others bang on recovered sheet metal, makeshift drums, and wooden blocks to create a rhythm.
It’s a spectacular display. The shocked and amused faces of the children culminate in an overwhelming glee. A memory to last a lifetime and a spark of divine shot through the seams of waking life.
Body archives
Unlike music, whose machines and studios provide the shape and constraints to an artist’s work, dance goes where the body goes. Formal recording is visual. And so, videographer and VJ designer Vincent Moon was invited to point a lens at the performances to give them material meaning.
Vincent Moon is a world renowned independent filmmaker from Paris. Known for his Petites Planètes collection that explores local folklores, sacred music and religious rituals, Vincent Moon propels his camera into the moment, to be shared later for free on the internet, under Creative Commons license.
Vincent Moon was able to capture many dance spectacles. One of the more gripping was another performance at Kampala’s Gbaga Fish Market with French-Congolese, Berlin based no-limit fashion designer, embodied performer and hybrid visual artist, Natisa Exocé Kasongo or simply, Exocé. Alongside Exocé were Tanzanian singeli dancers Nana & Zai. A deadly twerk duo, Nana & Zai are Tanzanian Queens of the dancefloor mastering their bodies in rhythms that often roll at a minimum of 200 bpm.
The performance and accompanying film is fearless. Dressed in the designs of Exocé’s Kasapio fashion brand and set to another Afropollination participant and Nyege Nyege studio manager Chrisman’s heavy doomsday track, the work is terrifying and beautiful. Stunned faces surround the trio. Exocé’s cowry shell mask is carefully placed on a boy’s arm. Nana & Zai gnarl at the camera like dragons…
Dance became an expression of the residency’s music. But more than that, it became the bridge from the inside to the out. Working into the public, outside festival gates, in markets, it was a way for the artists to offer their creations back to the world.
Letting things bloom
None of the work of Afropollination exists in a vacuum. The artist’s creations are meant to be shared, their experiences opened up to the broader community. During the residency there were several occasions to showcase the results of the program.
There is, of course, the legendary Nyege Nyege festival hosted at Itanda Falls, Uganda, on the rapids of the Nile. It was the first live laboratory for the residencies to take the stage. Here, in the pine forest, another gqom maverick DJ MP3 goes b2b with Menzi for a pop-flavored gqom set. ASTAN KA & BINGHI? Thelma Ndebele aka Dormant Youth, a master of underground boom curates a set alongside ethno-futurist and club all star Bloomfeld.
It’s a free for all of music and madness.
Later in the year was Berlin’s CTM festival. The German festival, music, and art platform was a fitting stopover, stating in its mission that it “connects multi-perspective experiences, critical reflection, hedonism, and collaborative learning.” An eerily similar mission to that of Afropollinatoin itself. Jessica Ekomane and Afrorack also performed at the HAU2 international theater and performance center, continuing to refine their sound science.
Videographer Jan Moss, who participated in much of the Afropollination experience in Uganda behind the lens screened his film Singeli Movement: Greed for Speed which featured Sisso, Maiko, Jay Mita and others, followed by a performance with Jay Mitta himself.
The newly dubbed supergroup 3OK (Zoë Mc Pherson, Jay Mitta, and DJ Diaki) with Nana & Zai performed at Berlin’s legendary Berghain club (no photos allowed). Binghi and Astan Ka, the residency outfit of Bloomfeld, Phatstoki & Miziguruka named INSHINZI, Menzi and Debmaster… Everyone got a chance to showcase the fruits of the collaboration at one of the world’s most prestigious electronic events.
Finally there was the Festaal Kreuzberg event. A former vegetable market, Festaal is a place for gathering, music, and celebration, historically for Berlin’s Turkish, Nigerian and Indian communities. It’s here that Afropollination organized a closing event. There were dance tutorials from Exocé, Nana & Zai, live cinema with Vincent Moon, dance performances, and a club night that gave the stage to the Afropollination artists and groups. Open to the public, many wearing the collage-fashion of Exocé’s Kasapio brand, from the outside looking in, Afropollination had successfully pollinated the community.
Some artists were able to record their work for posterity. We’ve mentioned Astan Ka and Binghi’s track “Enchanted Forest”. There are also a series of radio shows that are sonic testament to the kaleidoscopic mix of sounds and influences that endured the entirety of the residency. A compilation out on Nyege Nyege also assembled some of the most striking work created during the many phases of the residency.
Photos, clips, snapshots, texts and memories… The true legacy of the residency lives in the resonance of the people involved. How each individual will operate differently in the world. An echo of influence, a newfound corridor of knowledge, a friend.