Bouba Touré & Raphaël Grisey

Bouba Touré (1948-2022, Mali/France) was a peasant, a writer, and a photographer. After his arrival as immigrant worker in France in the 1960s, he studied at Vincennes University and was a projectionist at Cinema 14 Juillet and L’entrepôt, Paris. A photographer since the 1970s, he documented the lives and struggles of migrant workers and peasants in France and Mali. Bouba Touré co-founded the Co-op of Somankidi Coura in 1977. In 2015, he published the book Notre case est à Saint Denis.

Raphaël Grisey (°1979, France) lives and works in Berlin. Grisey works with film, photography, archives, and as an editor, around memory, architecture, and migration politics. Through diverse documentary, fictional, or essayist forms, Grisey’s films and practice deal with neocolonial spatial politics and decolonial storytelling and practices around farming and urban space.

Touré and Grisey worked together for over fifteen years on collaborative projects under the current name of Sowing Somankidi Coura, a Generative Archive. This collaboration led to various workshops, exhibitions, films and theatre productions.

Bouba Touré & Raphaël Grisey – Xaraasi Xanne (Crossing Voices) (2022)

• Film screening on Saturday 21 June at 8:30 pm at Fobrux

Using rare cinematic, photographic and sound archives, Crossing Voices recounts the story of Somankidi Coura, an agricultural cooperative created in Mali in 1977 by a group of West Africans that used to live as migrant workers in France. The story of their improbable, utopic panafrican return to the land follows a winding path that travels through the ecological challenges, conflicts, and struggles of peasants and migrant workers in France and West Africa from the 1970s till today, told by Bouba Touré, one of its principal actors. 

Languages: Soninké, French, Bambara, Pulaar with English subtitles, 122 min.