Sylvia Wynter Foyer, HKW’s central rotunda, today constitutes an agora that has been carefully thought and shaped to stand for conviviality and collectivity in the house. Since the reopening of HKW in June 2023, a tradition has been established to invite artists whose practice employs spatial transformation to inhabit the Sylvia Wynter Foyer and to engage with its multi-dimensional as well as transcendental potential.  

Following the poetic intervention of Cameroonian artist, poet, and composer Tanka Fonta with his seminal visual score The Cosmogenic Interconnectedness ‘How Did We Talk Before the Roman Alphabet?’ The Picto-Sonic Dialogues I (2023), the foyer is once more transformed, this time into The Playground of All Possibilities as proposed by Malagasy artist Joël Andrianomearisoa. Andrianomearisoa’s contribution to Ballet of the Masses invites all visitors to situate themselves in a space of ascendence and transcendence, of presence and infinity, of the grandiose and the intimate, created by his monumental cloud sculptures suspended from the ceiling, the form of which also suggest ghostly presences.

The Playground of All Possibilities could be read through Edouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking, which urges an understanding of the multiple aspects of relationality that human islanders are entwined with, as well as the various supra beings they are embraced by. The archipelagos convened by the artist do not stand solely for individual landforms but refer to all constellations of terrain, water, human, and non-human beings who share the cosmos.

Bridging Ballet of the Masses to Bwa Kayiman—Tout Moun se Moun, and following the tradition of the ceremonial as it took place at the Bwa Kayiman gathering held in 1791 that invoked the Haitian Revolution, The Playground of All Possibilities is activated by performative gestures of hospitality and soul nourishment from June to August 2024. Taking inspiration from traditions of agoras such as Senegalese Pencs, Colombian Mingas, Peruvian Peñas, Haitian Lakous, and others, the space is dedicated to weaving and activating together historical, cultural, ancestral, and contemporary narratives.

This event takes place in the frame of On Football and the Theatre of Collective Body Making.