Please contact Ramon at the bottom of this e-mail for further details ...


This is a two-day workshop organized by Julien Bonhomme (ENS) and Ramon Sarro (University of Lisbon) in Lisbon, as (hopefully) the first in a series of events we plan to organize around images, prophetic imagination, writing, memory and ritual. In this first one, we limit our focus to Africa. 


The relationship between art and prophecy, complementary and alternative forms of imagination, is, intuitively speaking, obvious enough; yet there is still a lack of rigorous scientific research to be carried out about it. Many artists have been prophetic in their work, and many prophets have been artists in their ways of imagining the future and of translating this imagination into texts (sometimes even alphabets), drawings, houses or even cities. The interconnection between art and prophecy is an ideal place where to study the "work of the spirit" that Lévi-Strauss encouraged us to study, and the entanglement between, on the one hand, the domain of words and messages and, on the other, the domain of images and non-verbal connections. Our imaginative two-day journey will take us to Congo (a paradigmatic region of prophetic effervescence) the first day, and beyond Congo (West Africa and the Diaspora) the second day. Relying on the support of images (pictures, paintings, movies), we intend to comparatively analyze the connection between art and prophecy in Africa, in a workshop funded by the ANR Project "Création, Rituel, Mémoire" (Musée du quai Branly, Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale) and jointly co-organized by the musée du quai Branly, the Institute of Social Sciences (Lisbon), the École Normale Supérieur and the African Studies Centre of Lisbon.


Working language for the workshop will be French. 


All welcome. oh, and we will also visualize Filip de Boeck's film "Cemetery city", which was not in our initial programme, but by coincidence was set for the 24 May on the programme of a parallel series of films on Africa. The film deals with death and religious imagination in Kinshasa and it speaks to many of the topics that will have been discussed in the earlier papers that day. Please note that unlike the workshop, the Film will be in English (some bits in Lingala, with subtitles in English). 
Very best wishes
Ramon
NB this programme is still to be fully confirmed, there may be some minor adjustments in the final one. Please contact me if you intend to come and I'll keep you up-to-dated. 
-- 
Ramon Sarró, PhD (London), Habil. (Lisbon) 
Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow
Institute of Social Sciences
University of Lisbon
Av. Professor Aníbal de Bettencourt, 9
1600-189 Lisbon
Portugal
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