What's Your Perspective?

Starting from art, we negotiate cultural perspectives and open up new transdisciplinary spaces of exchange and encounters. With What's Your Perspective? we bring global debates into the local context - and invite you to become part of it.


What's Your Perspective? focuses on a particular topic for one to two years at a time. Currently, the focal point lies on the literary event series Afropolitan Perspectives.

What's Your Perspective?
Afropolitan Perspectives
Initiated by artlink and carried out with various partners troughout Switzerland
2022 - 2024

Afropolitan Perspectives is a project based on readings and discussions throughout Switzerland. We explore the long history of cultural influences and intermingling between Switzerland and the African continent, dating back to the transatlantic slave trade, spanning short- and long-term migratory movements of people from the African continent and the African diaspora, and culminating in today's anti-racist movements in Switzerland.

Popularised by author Tayie Selasi and philosopher Achille Mbembe, the term "Afropolitanism" - a blend of "Africa" and "cosmopolitanism" - refers primarily to Africans who live outside of Africa or on the continent, but not necessarily in their country of birth. They have developed or are developing a transnational culture. With Afropolitan Perspectives we want to show the ways in which Afropolitan currents intersect with Swiss society and culture.

Hand-in-hand with local partners

From 2022 to 2024, artlink will organise literary events throughout Switzerland. We work together with local partners – booksellers, academics, artists, curators and mediators – on the design of the events, always with the aim of foregrounding local links to the topic and experience of "Afropolitanism". Our co-curators give their personal touch to the events, actively contributing to the choice of texts, the invited speakers, and how the conversation unfolds on stage and beyond. We aim to promote a truly collaborative and participatory environment, in which people with direct links to Afropolitan communities and experiences in Switzerland determine the direction of the public exchange.

Events

  1. An Afropolitan Encounter: Vincent O. Carter’s "The Bern Book"

    Dachstock, Bern
    19.10.2022 | 19:00

    Born in 1924 in Kansas City and raised in poverty, the African-American author and painter Vincent O. Carter was deployed in the US Army in France during WWII and returned to Europe in the 1950s. He settled down in Bern, where he wrote, painted and worked as an English teacher until his death in the 1980s.

    Come meet Vincent O. Carter’s works and explore with us: What is Carter telling us today? What would we like to say to him?

    A community evening with food, conversation, art, texts, performances, music and dancing.

    Co-curated by the Bernese bookshop Klamauk and the community centre Living Room Bern.

    The Bern Book: A Record of a Voyage of the Mind was written in 1957 in Bern, first published in the USA in 1973 and only published in German translation in 2021.

    Details