Talking About! is a program, created by Lucia Babina and Zoe Gray, that brought six artists and cultural producers from Cameroon to the Netherlands in order to meet, exchange and share with the Dutch audience and cultural initiatives.
The program entails in a first phase visits to a number of Dutch art institutions and initiatives, providing the Cameroonian guests with an overview of the Dutch cultural scene. Interspersed within these visits there have been several moments of discussion, open to the public or to an invited audience. In a second phase, guests collaborates each with a host institution or organization in order to exchange information and ideas. Those phases were designed to: starting a peer-to-peer dialogue between professionals with various backgrounds and experiences whose activities and projects are influenced by – and are able to affect – the diverse contexts in which they operate; the challenging or opening up of established ways of thinking; recognizing the equal value of their different expertise and practices and drawing upon that knowledge as a possible starting point for productive confrontation and exchange; creating a network of interested parties who might want to develop further collaborations in the future, depending on their individual interests, possibilities, and connections; establishing an alternative form of cross-cultural interaction; avoiding a purely Euro-centric way of thinking and the all too common paternalism still present in European cultural projects linked to Africa.
In order to give relevance to what happened during Talking About! and to further encourage a discussion, Fucking Good Art (Rotterdam) and DIARTgonale (Douala) created a joint edition of their magazines dedicated to this experience.