Lors d’une table ronde organisée à KADIST le 10 décembre 2021 intitulée After Àsìkò. Artistic and Curatorial Practices in Africa, les commissaires Iheanyi Onwuegbucha et Aude Christel Mgba ont pu mettre en parallèle différentes initiatives pédagogiques du continent africain, comme Àsìkò ou encore Artbakery créé par l’artiste camerounais Goddy Leye. Dominique Malaquais a fréquenté ses différents lieux, en son hommage voici l’histoire d’ Àsìkò, une initiative curatoriale et pédagogique fondée au CCA, Lagos par Bisi Silva en 2010.

“Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas,” we read of one of Chaucer’s pilgrims, “And yet he semed bisier than he was.” And yet? The logic of these lines seems more than a little mischievous. Nowhere could there be found a man as busy as this, and yet this man seemed busier than he was. If both of those statements are strictly true, most men are not as busy as they seem, and diligence is largely a matter of (...) show. It seems that professional, as that word is used to distinguish the worker from mere amateurs, was indeed a creation of the nineteenth century; and there are a host of reasons—not least, the industrial revolution—for tracing many of our modern convictions about work to that era. As a student captivated by the prose of the so-called Victorian prophets, Carlyle, Ruskin, and their followers, I began to conclude that their most frequently quoted passage from all the Bible was this: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest” . In truth, much preachment of hard work tends to affectation, if not downright self-contradiction. (shrink)

The Clerk's Tale is the most elusive and least reassuring of Chaucer's religious tales. Though bad things happen to good people in the other religious narratives in the Canterbury collection, repeated assurances in those tales confirm that the world is governed by a powerful God intent on rewarding his faithful followers. By comparison, the Clerk and his tale are disturbingly silent on the subject of God's plan until the very end, leading many readers to categorize the tale as secular, developing (...) in what seems “a moral void” , or worse, a perverse story of a bullying tyrant and his spineless wife. In spite of Griselda's virtue, which is attributed to God's grace, she suffers alone, and the reasons for her suffering are made to seem arbitrary and weak. A domestic story of husband and wife set neither in the remote past nor far off in a heathen-filled land, the tale proceeds without the special effects of divine intervention that help guide our response to the stories of Constance, St. Cecilia, and the child-martyr of the Prioress's Tale. Miracles, mass conversions, and mysterious sea journeys seem out of the question in the closed and predictable world of Saluzzo. Even when Walter's people urge him to consider the problem of death, as arbitrary as it is inevitable, the solution they put forward is not transcendent or spiritual but prudential: Walter should settle down, take a wife, and produce an heir. Walter answers the people's mundane “preyere” to “delivere us out of al this bisy drede” in the pragmatic spirit in which it was delivered: he agrees to marry and promptly produces a child , removing what seems the only obstacle to complete “felicitee” in the realm. (shrink)