SPARCK is a Pan-African initiative of experimental multi-disciplinary residencies, workshops, symposia, exhibitions, publications and performances centred on innovative, ethically driven approaches to urban space.

Across the African world, SPARCK engages with creators working in image, sound, word and video, installation, transient architectures, cutting-edge technologies and emergent media on projects that question the status quo, refusing clichés and easy answers.

Original, flexible set-ups offer artists and thinkers unorthodox and highly productive platforms to address how cities in Africa and her diasporas live, breathe, morph and grow. Alternative ways of thinking about urban spaces and cultures prompt radical re-readings of global experience and pave the way for socially inclusive practices of daily, communal engagement.

SPARCK’s network-driven, collaborative projects dissolve boundaries between disciplines and types of knowledge, opening up spaces of democratic exchange to foster dialogue across age, class, gender, spatial, occupational and ethnic divides.

SPARCK is a triennial programme. Each three-year cycle focuses on a specific set of themes. Our first three-year programme (2009-2011) is titled “NET/WORKS: Trans-Local Cultures in the Making of African Worlds”.

SPARCK is run by a two-women, activist-artist-writer-scholar team: Kadiatou Diallo and Dominique Malaquais.

SPARCK was founded in 2008. Its history, however, goes further back and is directly linked to the inception of the Africa Centre, a Cape Town based NGO dedicated to contemporary artistic practice on the African continent. The idea of the Africa Centre emerged, initially, from a discussion process that brought together nine artists, scholars and activists from across Africa, Europe and North America over an 18-month period. From this discussion came the conclusion that, at the heart of the Africa Centre, should be a programme of residencies, performances, publications, exhibitions, workshops and interventions focused on experimental urban creation across the African world. In 2007, three members of the initial nine-person team came together to work on the theoretical and thematic structure of this programme:

- An urban sociologist: AbdouMaliq Simone;

- A choreographer: Faustin Linyekula;

- An art historian and political scientist: Dominique Malaquais.

In early 2008, Kadiatou Diallo - an artist and educator - joined the team. A few months later, the programme, now officially called SPARCK, was up and running. Since then, it has been led by Malaquais and Diallo.

Source : http://www.sparck.org