Boda Boda Lounge is a cross-continental video art festival that takes place at over 15 spaces across the African continent this November.

This year’s edition titled Soft Pow(ers) is conceptualised by artist Euridice Zaituna Kala. Artists were invited to respond to Édouard Glissant’s notion of Tout Monde (all the world): to deepen and complicate the links amongst the complex African worlds that go beyond the inherited Anglo, Luso and Francoworlds, to creolise rather than hybridise, and to compose a new language within these parameters – that Tout Monde identity, that soft pow(er), that is at times operating covertly. The call was to reflect on identity not as a single strand or a single truth but one that has been shaped and reshaped by different encounters, resulting in a dynamic identity that is not bound by place, especially in this moment where technology temporarily flattens space.

One is therefore confronted by a possible loss of perfect diction – an inability to articulate in one language, when accepting the Tout Monde as each individual finds new ways for the practice of the everyday that is informed by a multitude of contexts.

The term Boda Boda is an adaptation of the word border and alludes to a cross-border movement, suggesting physical mobility and movement across lines that universally represent the divide of land and space.

The Boda Boda Lounge festival is based on the conviction that video art can create exchanges between different contexts in Africa that allow both the transcending of physical boundaries and the creation of an intimate atmosphere for introspection and contemplation. It is an engagement with low-cost, widely accessible exchange processes on the African Continent. Soft Pow(ers) is the 3rd edition of the project.