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OUALI Noria
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Whereas the employment statistics hardly recognize the presence of the Sub-Saharan population, recent studies have shown that on the ground and in cultural as well as economic exchanges the presence of this population is very much felt in Brussels. With regard to the Sub-Saharans' professional investment, artistic practice is by far the most prominent. This practice asserts to the high cultural capital held by the Sub-Saharans, capital that often goes unrecognized by the Belgian institutions. It is in this context of variegated (in)visibility that the PhD thesis will explore the rise of a Sub-Saharan artistic milieu in a variety of highly urban spaces of entertainment, ceremonial and community activities, etc. Our hypothesis is that this artistic milieu, regardless of its own internal fragmentation, forms a very active territory in the city. This territory is made of common assertions, spatial markings, nodes and networks. In order to make it visible, i.e. in order to bring this milieu to the surface, we will explore it from different angles. We will analyze how the artistic activities are shaped by (post-)migration trajectories (involving social networks, collective memory, etc.) and how, in their turn, they shape a new milieu of shared competences. We will uncover the networks of coordination and anchorage that underlie these activities in the city, as well as the set of institutional intermediaries that foster the recognition and the redefinition of these activities. Thus we seek to assess the existence of an interconnected Sub-Saharan artistic territory in Brussels.
