On 30 May at 18-21:00 I will be co-hosting a film screening at the DAMSLab/Auditorium (Piazzetta P.P. Pasolini, 5b – Bologna) with director Raphaël Grisey

Part of the ERC funded HEMIG project – Hostile Environments: the Political Ecology of Migration and Border Violence, the film Screening will host the powerful film Xaraasi Xanne – Crossing Voices (in English and French with English subtitles). Using rare cinematic, photographic and sound archives, Crossing Voices focuses upon the extraordinary life story of Bouba Touré. An activist and photographer, Touré was one of the founding members of the radical Malian agricultural cooperative Somankidi Coura formed in Paris in 1977 by western African immigrant workers living in workers’ residences in France.

Largely drawn from a rich personal archive, the film was co-directed with French artist Raphaël Grisey and charts the civil rights movement in France and the interwoven anti-colonial liberation struggles on the African continent. The story of this improbable, utopic return to the homeland follows a winding path that travels through the ecological challenges and conflicts on the African continent from the 1970s to the present day. It documents peasant struggles in France and Mali as well as following the personal stories of migrant workers over many decades.