Our practice unfolds within the rural landscape of The Gambia, a space where cultural infrastructures are sparse, fragile, or entirely absent. This periphery is not an empty zone but what Édouard Glissant would call a "landscape of relation"¹—an environment where meaning is formed through encounters with plants, dust, humidity, and the quiet negotiations of daily life. The rural environment operates as a vernacular institution, governed by unwritten rules and forms of knowledge that exceed the categories of formal cultural systems. Working here positions us at the margin of the stabilising infrastructures of the global art world, yet it offers a clarity unavailable within what Achille Mbembe describes as the "entangled" circulations of contemporary cultural life².

In this invisible embeddedness of formal institutions—what looks like an absence—we create our own. The House of Culture Tintinto with its Pavilion functions as counter-institution: modest, situated, and intentionally fragile. It is described by visitors as paradisaic—which flatters me yet unsettles me, because paradise implies completion and harmony. I have never imagined such a place as real or possible. Maybe as a utopia. I think of Tintinto instead as an observatory: a withdrawal from the compulsion to achieve toward a quieter form of participation in the world.

This ethos aligns with Glissant's insistence on the legitimacy of opacity and the right to remain outside normative systems of visibility. In the spirit of Koyo Kouoh's reflections on the necessity of building African cultural institutions from the ground up, with attention to locality and lived conditions³, our initiatives form small-scale infrastructures designed to host thought, encounter, and care without relying on external validation. To build an observatory is therefore to build a space of attention—one where even the briefest acknowledgment can shine like a quiet light.

Photography and writing serve as my personal principal methods for attending to what institutional frameworks habitually overlook. I focus on the emotional substrata of everyday life—details often dismissed as peripheral but which reveal, in Glissant's terms, the "thickness of place"⁴. Writing allows questions of belonging, care, and identity to mature slowly, inhabiting the temporalities of the environment rather than the accelerated pace of contemporary art production. Much of this writing is produced from within the observatory of Tintinto, where perception is allowed to stretch, drift, and return in its own time.

Slowness, exhaustion, and doubt are not impediments; they are conditions of work. They reflect what Mbembe identifies as the constraints and possibilities of life in spaces shaped by historical rupture and structural scarcity⁵. Our practice grows at the tempo of animals, plants and weather, resisting the extractive rhythms of cultural production. It proposes an ecological and emotional critique of systems that demand constant output, insisting instead on attention, endurance, and situated presence. This temporal stance is inseparable from the observatory method: to step back is not to withdraw, but to perceive more fully.

It is a position of distance—not outside culture, but outside its sanctioned centers. From this vantage, we can observe how institutions construct visibility and value, and we can choose not to participate in their economies of recognition. Following Kouoh's call for decentralized and context-responsive cultural models⁶, our work cultivates spaces where reflection and creation can coexist without being absorbed into institutional narratives. Between solitude and relation, critique and construction, we negotiate what exists and what remains possible.

Eventually, our practice seeks to generate meaning where the map shows little cultural infrastructure in the conventional sense. In doing so, it embraces Glissant's conviction that the periphery is not marginal but fertile—a site where other forms of thought, relation, and future-making can emerge⁷. In this sense, the observatory is not an escape but a proposition: that attention, humility, and quiet forms of recognition may reshape the terrains on which culture is imagined, practiced, and felt.

1) Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 27–34.
2) Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
3) Koyo Kouoh, "On Institution Building," in various lectures and writings, esp. RAW Material Company public talks (2010–2019).
4) Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 112.
5) Achille Mbembe, "At the Edge of the World," in On the Postcolony.
6) Koyo Kouoh, conversations on "institutional ethics," RAW Material Company, Dakar.
z) Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190.

Maren Sanneh, December 2025