Program 2025

RAW Material Company is delighted to announce its 2025 program, including artist residencies, public programs, international collaboration, and the RAW Académie.

Kër Issa—RAW Residency 
The RAW Material Company residency program began in 2011 and has welcomed over 70 artists, writers, researchers and curators from all backgrounds to Dakar. The residency program is open to visual artists interested in any medium, as well as writers, curators, musicians, filmmakers, architects, researchers and PhD students.

This year we are delighted to be hosting two international residency programs. The first with filmmaker, researcher and film program developer Janilda Bartolomeu. The second is with Maguette Dieng, a Senegalese DJ and producer based in Barcelona. For the 14th edition of the Partcours, we wi’ll be welcoming Chimurenga in a bibliographic research installation.

Fridays @RAW 
Fridays @RAW is a series of discursive programs held every Friday at RAW Material Company. The program is built around four thematic components and is organised in collaboration with local practitioners and experts in their fields:

RAW Ciné-club is a series of film screenings followed by discussions in the presence of the directors. The ciné-club is an opportunity to learn more about Senegal’s cinematographic universe and to discuss its future. RAW Ciné-club is organized in collaboration with Aboubacar Demba Cissokho.

Citéologies is a program of reflection and research on architectural and urban planning policies in African cities. It provides a framework for raising awareness of the current state of the relationship between human beings and the built environment in Africa. Citéologies is a collaboration with Carole Diop. 

vox-ARTIS is a free space for the presentation, discussion and confrontation of ideas about art, its practice, production, collection, criticism, analysis and presentation. It’s a time for sharing around the practice of films in art, lectures by artists and other art professionals, portfolio reviews, book presentations and general discussion of the role of artistic creativity in society. The vox-ARTIS program is in collaboration with Massamba Mbaye.

The Argument revives the argumentative and contradictory debate around prevalent issues in our daily lives. 

The Pencco is an all-day gathering to forge links around shared values and topics of community involvement, linked to our context.

A Sense of Place/Displacement, Replacement, Non-placement
RAW Académie Session 11 builds on the compelling reflections initiated during Condition Report 5: A Sense of Place/Displacement, Replacement, Non-placement, an international symposium developed in collaboration with Prof. Felwine Sarr. The symposium explored how places embody histories, connections, and energies that are often invisible but deeply felt. It asked how such presences can be nurtured, sustained, and transformed in a world increasingly marked by displacement and environmental, social, and political upheaval.

The invited faculty will for this session include anthropologist and historian Abdourahmane Seck; architect and anthropologist Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou; historian and exhibition maker Samia Henni; interdisciplinary historian, activist and social and political organiser Dr Sónia Vaz Borges (to be confirmed); researcher, designer and architectural educator Mae-ling Lokko; and finally Alibeta, musician, curator, filmmaker, writer and founder of KENU LAB’Oratoire des Imaginaires. It will run from June 2 to July 4, 2025.

Publications
The Specter of Ancestors Becoming book is the fruit of five years of work for RAW Material Company and artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, but some nearly eight decades of life for the individuals who together form the Senegalese-Vietnamese community. This collaboration culminated in the process of creation of the filmic artwork The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), as well as its final form, which is discussed in great depth in this book. The stories of the Senegalese-Vietnamese community that the piece invites us into will never be complete, and we conceive of this book as a further vessel to carry their fragments forward in the hope that the curiosity, empathy and solidarity of you the reader will give voice to the words printed here.

Condition Report 4: Stepping out of line; Art collectives and translocal parallelism, curated by RAW Material Company as part of the Dhaka Art Summit 2020, existed as a forum for addressing practices and forms of production that take the cooperating, non-hierarchical group as a guiding principle. This publication invites the participants of the forum, as well as other thinking partners, to revisit the themes underpinning Stepping out of line; the aesthetics of collective practice, writing collective history, collective economies and the death of the collective. Their unique but interwoven perspectives that stretch the globe are given breadth here, and the strong historical axis at the center of the book helps to draw a line across geographical localities that are now so exposed in their interdependence. 

RAW international
Nieuwe Instituut x Janilda Bartolomeu: Public program in June 2025 & exhibition in November 2025. On 5 July 2025, the 50th Cape Verdean Independence Day, Nosagenda, a Rotterdam based cultural organization connecting Cape Verde and the diaspora and Nieuwe Instituut organise a rich programme celebrating and deepening the knowledge of Cape Verdean culture. Central point is the research that Janilda Bartolomeu did during her residency in Dakar at RAW Material Company, laying bare some of the connections between the Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam and the one in Dakar. In addition to this showcase there are panel talks, a pop-up expo with activities organized for children. 

RAW mentorship
The Pan-African Translocal Media Workshop (PATMW) is being produced by Denniston Hill and Realness Institute in association with BMW. This project grew out of Julie Mehretu’s second part commission to do a rotating media arts workshop across five African cities (Dakar, Lagos, Tangier, Durban, and Nairobi) with esteemed artists facilitating discussions about our hypermediated culture and what it means in each city. This workshop builds on the Exodus Media Workshop (EMW) which is an arts education laboratory initiated by Denniston Hill that focuses on the co-dependent inventions of image making and representation in the media. Working across the various African cities, and online, the participants will form a temporary creative laboratory and studio that produces new work under the lead artists’ leadership.

RAW partners
RAW Material Company would like to acknowledge the valuable support of the Mellon Foundation, Little Sun, Community Arts Network (CAN), and the Creative Industries Fund NL. We’re also deeply grateful to Arts Collaboratory and Parcourts, cultural ecosystems of which RAW is a member, for their contribution to the research process and intellectual growth.

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