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Christian Nyampeta is an artist who investigates into how individuals and communities negotiate forms of socially organised violence. Nyampeta makes use of what he, following his friends, refers to in terms of practical philosophy. This is a “poeisis of worlding”, making and doing that generates both singularised and collective considerations, in the hope that such understanding may relieve some of the anguish to which the legion of structural oppression subjects us.
Owing to the generosity of many and their collaborative efforts spanning over a number of years, Nyampeta has staged social encounters through which various artists, philosophers, practitioners, institutions and individuals live and work together, and through which workshops, seminars, interiors, instruments, exhibitions, fellowships and publications have been materialised. These activities take place regionally and further afield, in public institutions as well as in intimate circles of regional homes, in transnational research groups and other bodies that do not easily lend themselves to wording.
Nyampeta’s theoretical anchor is the study of the ways of work and life of the early ascetics and monks and their organisational principles. Nyampeta is a PhD candidate at the Visual Cultures Department of Goldsmiths, University of London. Here, he researches idiorrhythmy, a formational concept for regional utopian imaginaries drawn from early asceticism, proposed through the seminar lectures of Roland Barthes at the Collège de France titled How To Live Together.
Nyampeta's work seeks affinities with those who call for a collective autonomy attained through a regime of both self-work and common practice. This call for resensivitisation is achieved through the use of what ascetics have characterised as exercise and technique: writing and narrating, maintaining a craft such as basket making, weaving, stone hut building, botany, sandal making, etc; and spiritualism, as well as pilgrimage.
Ongoing activities include contributions to research programmes of How We Behave, The Grand Domestic Revolution, Practice International and Tagore, Pedagogy and Contemporary Visual Cultures. Recent exhibitions include How to Live Together: Prototypes, The Showroom, London; New Habits, the research group exhibition organised by Casco – Office for Art Design and Theory, Utrecht; How To Live Together at Casco and at Stroom Den Haag between 2013 and 2014.
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