Taught to Travel, a Curatorial and Ethnographic Project Between Dakar and Singapore

Paper Abstract: Taught To Travel (T2T) is an ongoing project initiated in 2021, in collaboration with Dakar based RAW Material Company and extended into the Indian Ocean with the Singapore Art Museum. T2T is an exploration, through the creation of a video repository, and ethnographic descriptions, of movement that is taught. It has taken the form of individual and community facilitated commissions and a discursive program physically across Dakar, Tripoli, Singapore and Berlin. T2T operated by creating open briefs that support the production of new video works by artists and anthropologists, that evidence the relation between migration and education in all their divergent interpretations.

The work emerged from a connection between West Africa, the Sahara and the Indian Ocean, where migration exists in multiplicities through Sufi networks, across geographic and temporal distances, and is encoded in various modalities and rituals while being transmitted through acts of teaching. Participants were asked to document examples of specific stories, acts, singular moments, anecdotes, and rituals that show how journeys and pedagogies come together, in response to a set of prompts.

In this paper, I will present parts of the project and reflect on the applicability of oceanic concepts such as mobile societies [Ho 2015] and archipelagic ethnography [Mahajan 2021] in bridging the Sahara with the Indian Ocean, and what, collaboration, methodologies and historiographies are necessary for such trans-regional study.