Probing the OTHER/wise

Djolifon is an African feminist initiative that nurtures and inspires the emergence and growth of the bearers of the other/wise in aesthetics and artistry. As a political home and an intermediary feminist fund, we seek to catalyze forms of creativity and activism that embrace the sensuality of the impossible and are comfortable with uncertainties, failures, and the limitations of politics. We especially seek ideas and practices that bring into the light the ways of the small, the slow, the “inefficient,” the “irrational,” and above all the invisible and the unthinkable in artistic and political imaginaries and endeavors.

• Convene and facilitate online and physical space to instigate critical lines of inquiry, approaches and processes that trouble our current notions of activism and support individual and collective investigation(s) of other possibilities and potentialities for addressing our environmental and civilizational crisis.

• Convene and facilitate individual and collective generative practices dedicated to attending to our wounds and grappling with the challenge of living and honoring all life amidst mass extinctions and organized chaos.

• Mobilize resource to fund the work we set ourselves to do.

• Document and study the dynamic, fluid interplay between the unfolding challenges of this historical moment and the failures and potentialities of our ways of meeting them.

We see ourselves as both facilitator and co-conspirator, co-creating spaces, lines of inquiry, approaches and processes with a wide range of individuals, collectives, and networks, exploring how to respond to the crisis of our time. Our continuously adaptive approach reflects a passion for critical connections, a deep appreciation for our interconnectedness with everything, and the wisdom to be found in the peripheries. We especially care for and seek to facilitate:

• Slow rhythms. We embrace the imperative of moving away from the false sense of importance associated with the “frenziedness” of conventional activism and opening activism to the “what-else,” to notice and attend to the seemingly insignificant.

• Small-scale experimentations that embrace the risks inherent to any truly creative process and that integrate the possibilities and potentialities that un-making and failure offer us.

• Fluid, flexible collaborations with kindred spirits—those defectors at the peripheries passionately involved in radical political (re)imaginations and embodiments of their versions of the other/wise—through which our wild dreams of other modes of engagement and responses to the realities of this critical planetary moment will converge and synergize.

• Intergenerational and trans-local entanglements that seek and welcome enrichment of the tapestry of inquiry, approaches, processes, and interactions of our collective attempt to forge radical relationalities.