Artist Jean Luc Raharimanana talks with Dr. Cassandra Mark-Thiesen

Abstract

Abstract: In the month of May 2023, the poet and musician Jean Luc Raharimanana from Madagascar was invited by the Cluster of Excellence to accompany the Cluster's events and record his observations. In this episode of the Cluster Conversations Junior Research Group Leader Dr. Cassandra Mark-Thiesen took the opportunity to talk to the malagassy artist about paralells between her work and his.

People & roles

Guest(s): Raharimanana, Jean Luc; Mark-Thiesen, Cassandra

Origins & context

Title: Artist Jean Luc Raharimanana talks with Dr. Cassandra Mark-Thiesen
Language: English; French
Podcast series: Cluster Conversations
Date: May 22, 2023

Rights & access

Extent: 42 minutes, 55 seconds

Identifiers & sources

has URL: https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/en/1_4-Public-engagement_-engagement1/Podcasts/ClusterConversations/Episode7/index.php

Further details

Episode number: 7

Full text

[music] Speaker 1: Cluster Conversations, a podcast by Africa Multiple. Speaker 1: Okay, welcome to Cluster Conversations. I am Cassandra Markteisen, leader of the Junior Research Group African Knowledges and the History Publication. And today I am honored to be sitting here with Jean-Luc Raharimanana, born in Madagascar and having later migrated to France where he currently lives in Paris. Raharimanana is author and artist dealing with life in and between these spaces, childhood, decolonization, political repression, migration. Those are all themes running through his work. And in doing so, he ruminates about human experiences, issues of departure from loved ones, home, inequality and belonging. And what I really appreciate about his work is the way that it holds the pain and joy of all of these experiences all at once. So I think this is a sense of awareness that many people or let's say more people around the world are better tuned into these days. Let me also introduce Jelena Miailovic who is a master student here at the University of Bayreuth in Francophone literature. So to begin, someone once called me lucky, lucky because a war broke out in Liberia, my first home in 1989 when I was nine years old and my family had to flee to Switzerland where I later finished school, et cetera, and where my parents currently reside to this day. Yet based on that experience, I feel like I carry something around with me, something that few people are actually interested in and that I've gotten used to not mentioning. And I felt that was something or that something was kind of tapped into with your work and I really enjoyed getting to know your work recently. And I think that maybe it's this kind of tension, this wanting to deal with this something that perhaps made me become a historian. Because I think that under certain circumstances, because I think that under certain circumstances we are called on as individuals to bear witness, to bear witness to our own stories, to… Read the full text about 5,051 words