contact: info@firstwaves.be
First Waves is a collaborative open platform that proposes to share the often-silenced stories of the struggles for dignity of the Maghrebi and Black diasporas in Belgium.
First Waves is a collaborative open platform that proposes to share the often-silenced stories of the struggles for dignity of the Maghrebi and Black diasporas in Belgium. It proposes to bring to light the early waves that reveal and erode persistent racialized and colonial structures. By collaborating with the witnesses and protagonists of these first waves, the platform gathers memories, recorded testimonies and archival materials washed ashore, spanning from the colonial era to the dawn of the new millennium. This effort aspires to initiate a transformative ebb and flow of memorial restitution, repairing and honoring memories shaped by the waves of antiracist struggles that precede us. These constitutive waves, overflowing the shores of time, from eternity to eternity, continue to move the undercurrent of the present, sedimenting the enduring impact of historical contempt and eroding different pathways towards a shared dignified horizon.
With testimonies of Ahmed Oubari, Billy Kalonji, Fatiha Saidi, Bambi Ceuppens, Mustapha Bentaleb, Omar Ba, Rachida El Idrissi, Suzanne Monkassa, Zoulika Atarhouch and Ken Ndiaye.
Poet and cultural worker Samira Saleh invited Myriem El-Kaddouri, Kavena Gomos/Le Dauphin, Avery Bertrand Iradukunda and Zaineb Hamdi to continue the undulations gathered in the first waves platform in the form of a poem.
Testimonies and poems filmed and edited by Mustapha Bandini and Najib Chairi.
Interviews by Mustapha Bentaleb, Ilke Adams and Joachim Ben Yakoub
First Waves is an open collaborative platform cooked with love in the Kitchen, bringing together the Memory/History collective and the Pioneers of Anti-Racism project. The platform is designed by Simon Bouvier and Lionel Maes (those.tools), with the support of Equal.Be, MENARG & S:PAM (UGent) and BIRMM (VUB).
The Mémoire/Histoire collective is dedicated to the memorial restitution of the memory of Magrhebi militant histories in Brussels, tracing its relations with post-colonial struggles in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as with the solidarity movements with Palestine between 1960 and 1980.
The Kitchen is a place always in the making located in the centre of Brussels, an assembly of sorts, where different artists, curators and researchers share their work, cook, and hang out, where they set up events, talks and screenings, but also do their work, broadcasting, reprinting, and studying.
Initiated at the BIRMM research centre of the VUB, the Pioneers of Anti-Racism project aims to document and explore the history of anti-racist activism in Belgium, focusing on the experiences of racialized activists with roots in North or Sub-Saharan Africa. It sheds light on the uncharted narratives and struggles of these activists prior to the 2000s, examining their main claims, strategies, and the socio-political contexts of their mobilization.
those.tools is a software development studio for research, editorial and publishing practices in the arts and social sciences. They develop free and open source tools for writing, archiving, mapping, designing and publishing research with a strong focus on collective creative processes.
firstwaves.be is hosted in Brussels by Tactic asbl.