My first session at RAW Académie transformed me as a curator. The study program is part of RAW Material Company, an organisation founded in Dakar, Senegal, by the late Cameroonian Swiss curator — and former Art Basel Awards jury member — Koyo Kouoh, whose Venice Biennale exhibition, ‘In Minor Keys,’ opens to the public next week. It was 2025, and I urgently needed a space for critical discussion and rest, away from my work in Nigeria. The year before, I had juggled curating the exhibition, ‘Arewa?’, at the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art in Lagos and a festival in Abuja, while working to shape resilient arts and cultural policy in my role as Director of Arts at the capital’s African School of Economics. In seminars at RAW, with nine other brilliant artists, writers, and cultural practitioners from around the world, I discussed everything from the structures that make hospitality possible in cities, to fragmented ways of exhibition-making. Our group took walking tours of Dakar and sat under the mango trees in RAW’s courtyard while our tutor played songs by the American soul legend Sam Cooke, the Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa, and the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, whose lyrics echoed the possible futures we discussed. We learnt how to make the Senegalese national dish of thieboudienne in the RAW kitchen. We also presented and re-presented our project proposals to every new faculty member that arrived, including philosopher, novelist, and musician Felwine Sarr, historian and activist Sónia Vaz Borges, and architect and historian Samia Henni. A fellow participant, the writer and cultural worker Mamadou Diallo, described the process of going through the RAW Académie as a ‘fortified mind’ being assailed by ‘hordes of nuanced ideas.’ To partake, was to allow not only our creative projects to be reconstructed, but also our sense of self.

RAW Material Company has provided a critical heartbeat for the development of art in Africa since it was established by Kouoh in 2008. In a move that will introduce a wider audience to these pioneering institutions, it’s one of several ‘schools’ from the continent and beyond to be included in ‘In Minor Keys’, her posthumously realized exhibition for this year’s Venice Biennale. From spaces founded in Africa – including RAW, blaxTARLINES KUMASI in Ghana, Nairobi, Contemporary Art Institute in Kenya, and Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation in Nigeria – to lugar a dudas in Colombia, they provide alternative hubs for knowledge exchange and creative production, building necessary infrastructure such as mobile libraries, exhibition spaces, and research workshops, with a community focus that might include public lecture series or open-source publications. Their participation in the biennale is a timely and necessary acknowledgment that emphasises the need and importance of knowledge-building.

RAW wasn’t my first encounter with artist-run initiatives. In 2022, I’d been chatting with my friend Al Hassan Issah, a Ghanaian artist and member of blaxTARLINES. As I listed potential master’s programs in the West that would reconcile my artistic practice and science-based academic qualifications, he floored me with one question: ‘Why don’t you come study in Kumasi?’ With this he exposed a blind spot: The thinking and teaching I was describing in my dream program was happening in Ghana, and I had almost missed the great transformation that had taken place. Soon, I would fall into the rabbit hole of blaxTARLINES, the contemporary art incubator based on a model of shared ownership and decentralized decision making, transforming art education in Ghana from its base at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. 

Studying with collective members like artists Al Hassan Issah and Halima Iddrisu, and curator Robin Riskin, I experienced their openness to sharing approaches and embracing curiosity while rejecting the usual hierarchies, be that between teacher and student or modes of creative production. Issah for example, looks to the traditional methods of constructing gates and fences in Kumasi, bridging community-rooted artisanal techniques with contemporary art practices within his sculptural paintings. The communal approach of blaxTARLINES has a distinct signature, rooted in the continent, yet transcending traditional geographic limitations. A key member, the curator, critic, and educator, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, describes their guiding axiom as the transformation of art from ‘commodity to gift,’ a radical refusal of the market, and a radical embrace of the community.

That same year, this alternative network led me to the G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos for a presentation by its inaugural resident, the Nigerian artist and poet Ofem Ubi. Away from the commercial pressures of the Lagos art scene, Ubi’s combination of poetry, photography, and filmmaking provided a refreshing interdisciplinarity. This approach has defined G.A.S. as a site where critical practices can be transplanted, since it was founded by the British artist Yinka Shonibare in 2019. From its twin spaces, one in the rural quiet of Ijebu Ode and the other in the urban density of Lagos, the foundation has staged a robust program of symposia, notably ‘Re:assemblages’ in 2025, exploring African and Afro-diasporic art, while its library has offered artists and researchers access to rare archives. It is the G.A.S. residency programs however that remain central to its approach. These have provided space and resources for both local and international, emerging and more established names, including the South African Nolan Oswald Dennis, the British-Nigerian Ranti Bam, and the Indian Raqs Media Collective. The only expectation of the artists is that they contribute to a locally responsive program, with workshops and exhibitions.

In an email exchange, G.A.S. laid out their ‘non-static pedagogical approach’ as ‘a dynamic and iterative call‑and‑response between G.A.S. and the communities we engage with. We respond to both visible and invisible gaps, but also those that traditional teaching models tend to overlook. Learning, collaboration, and care are inseparable from the creative process itself.’

Their inclusion in the Venice Biennale, they write, ‘signifies being seen, not merely by our immediate network, but by a practitioner and an ally who understood the depth of what we are seeking to do. For our community at home and our alumni, it reinforces that they are part of something transformative, an evolving, collective practice built through countless gestures, conversations, and exchanges.’

These schools will not just be viewed as sites of study but as artistic practices in their own right, positioned alongside the artists and poets in Kouoh’s exhibition that she described as ‘grounded in their commitments to realizing the minor keys.’ Because she had initiated a school of her own, Kouoh understood that the future depends on these generative spaces.