Toopi Jën Wi means Following the Fish in Wolof. The project is a collaboration between Leve Arquitectura and the Barcelona-based Senegalese collective Top Manta, founders of the Popular Union of Street Vendors. Presented as part of Catalonia in Venice, a programme of the Institut Ramon Llull, and as a Collateral Event of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, the project responds to institutional racism and precarious labour conditions, exploring how migrant knowledge travels, repairs cities, and generates alternative, sustainable urban imaginaries beyond Eurocentric narratives.
The performance-action that will take place within By the Mango Belt & Tamarind Road, proposed by Làmp Faal Kala (poet) and Daniel Cid (Winchester School of Art and part of Leve team), stages an intertextual encounter instead of a conventional academic presentation; a space where English and Wolof coexist as poetic and political forces.
This linguistic performance is based on a curatorial text, written in collaboration and conversation with Top Manta, translated into Wolof as an act of methodological hospitality: a way of allowing the work to speak with the cadences, references and narrative modes proper to Wolof.
On stage, two voices – one in English, the other in Wolof – will meet. Two ways of narrating a single journey, brushing against each other, overlapping, and at times contradicting one another. Within this woven sonic texture, by accompanying rather than translating, a third space of affective interlanguage emerges – where meaning is felt before it is understood.
This performance invites the audience into the friction and coexistence of these languages, into the question that guides the work of Following the Fish: How does knowledge travel when bodies travel?
This event is a cooperation between Winchester School of Art - University of Southampton and transmediale.
