In the mid-1970s, a political group made up of members of the West African diaspora in Paris decided to turn their back on factory work,
to become apprentices of French farmers; later founding the coop- erative “Somankidi Coura” in Mali. The Mauritanian director Sidney Sokhona based his feature Safrana ou le droit a la parole (1978) on them. It is a collective work in which the protagonists of the diaspora play themselves in central roles.
Sowing Somankidi Coura. A Generative Archive is a long-term research endeavor by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized cooperative along the Senegal river founded by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977 after the Sahel drought of 1973. The book assembles texts, voices, images, takes, retakes and research around the Pan-African history of the cooperative of Somankidi Coura, the liberation struggles of migrant workers and farmers in France and West Africa.
Initiated by visual artist, researcher and writer Åsa Sonjasdotter, in collaboration with practitioners of cultivation, the project Peace with the Earth – Tracing Agricultural Memory, Refiguring Practice revisits histories of agriculture.
Sowing Somankidi Coura presents a series of interviews with Bakhoré Bathily, Goundo Kamissokho Niakhaté, Mady Koïta Niakhaté, Ladji Niangané, Ousmane Sinaré, Siré Soumaré and Bouba Touré, the cooperative’s founders, a large selection of Bouba Touré’s photo archive, and various contributions from Raphaël Grisey, Tobias Hering, Olivier Marboeuf, Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye et Jean-Philippe Dedieu, Karinne Parrot, Romain Tiquet, Kàddu Yaraax and Sidney Sokhona.