May our song be worthy of those who listen

Over ten sessions, the reading room offers an immersive encounter with RAW Académie, alongside a curated selection of materials that echo RAW’s ethos and perception of knowledge production and its different modes of transmission and dissemination. The reading room also serves as a platform for mapping a landscape of the different voices that work with and around flexible models of artistic/radical pedagogies. In this sense, within the reading room RAW acts equally as a case study and a narrator that recounts the non-linear journey of “education” as cultivated through its notion as a laboratory, and through its network.

The title draws from Ahmed Bouanani’s evocation of the storyteller at the beginning of his film Mémoire 14: “Widen the circle—may God widen your graves—blessed be the poet and the storyteller, may our song be worthy of those who listen to us.”  It is also a direct reference to the Halqa [an Arabic word meaning “circle”], an ancient form of storytelling in Morocco where the storyteller or narrator performs in public spaces in a circular setting.

But the Halqa is not only a stage for telling stories: it is a space for collective movement and learning, a place for archiving and gathering. As such, it reflects the essence encapsulated in the notion of study employed by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in The Undercommons: “Study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.”

Inspired by this, the reading room examines the Halqa as a spatial, metaphorical and narrative conduit for creating a place where trails of knowledge are continually in the making.