Hearing room: Ghosts of the African Democratic Assembly

Hearing Room is an artistic research project on the forms of assembly of two intertwined histories: that of the trial of the militants of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain held in Abidjan between 1948 and ‘51, and that of my grandfather, J-B. K. Kouassi, Ivorian coffee planter and RDA partisan. The project brings together these two stories as testimonies of the Franco-Ivorian colonial and postcolonial past, with the coffee and cocoa agro-industry as its nexus, through the (re)assembly of a series of documents, images and recordings drawn from institutional collections and family archives. Based on this, three forms of (re)assemblage are explored as the conceptual foundation of a methodology: the traditional Ivorian Kita, made of several narrow strips of fabric; conflict montage, referring to the process of putting together two conflicting parts; and the palaver in Ivorian transitional justice mechanisms. Transferring these concepts to my documentary and narrative installation practice, the research aims to provoke a reflection on the dimensions of a work of restitution (in the double sense of repairing and reassembling what has been dismantled) by asking the following question: How can these forms of (re)assemblage conceive (1) a method of investigation, (2) a means of restoring the framework of a polyphonic narrative, and (3) a way of reconfiguring heterogeneous pieces of an archive through an installation, the writing of a fictional novel, and public assemblies?