The Outset Partners Awards Programme 2022 awarded a Transformative Award to Dig Where You Stand – From Coast to Coast is a series of travelling exhibitions across Africa, offering a new model of engagement with questions of decolonisation, restitution, and repatriation. The exhibition brings together examples of regenerative artistic practices and acts as a regenerative agent in itself – in each location leaving behind a toolkit for jump-starting regenerative economic processes. The artists and local communities explore generative strategies of intervention, cooperation, activism, and pedagogy. Dig Where You Stand functions as a discursive platform on which to pose questions and initiate conversations about issues grounded in local realities, as well as in politics of dispossession across broad areas and industries – from the lasting legacies of European imperialism in Africa to the intersections of privilege, access, and class. African Artists’ Foundation aims to address restitution, fast-tracking the process by appreciating accessible cultural heritage and establishing a new model of cultural dialogue concerning ownership, heritage, and restitution.
Azu Nwagbogu, Founder and Director of African Artists’ Foundation, said:
“For African Artists’ Foundation to receive this transformational grant for the innovative project ‘Dig Where You Stand’ at this time is opportune and humbling. We are extremely grateful to Outset for thinking with us throughout the process and for this generous award. It will allow us to create an energised way of connecting contemporary artists and art institutions across the continent with its various diasporas through meaningful exhibition-making metabolised through intellectual rigour and in-depth research.”
Click here to see the different iterations of the project.
