Paper title: “Our Common Ghosts”

Paper abstract: This paper is an philosophical-artistic inquiry that follows a study of concepts of rhythms and harmonies from ancient Western asceticism and contemporary Sub-Saharan philosophy, mediated through a practice of art in the field of visual cultures. Specifically, this study focuses on the ascetic notion of idiorrhythmy, how this term resonate with the understanding of rhythm and harmony in contemporary Rwandan philosophy, and the artistic manifestation informed by this notion.

This study of rhythm and harmony addresses the question of How To Live Together, in theory and in practice. First, 1) through a separate treatment of “idios” and “rhythm” that unravels transmissions between “Greek” philosophy, Western asceticism and Rwandan philosophy; and 2) through the insights from the artistic practice whose workshops and programmes stage and habituate these philosophical ideas and motives into fictions, models, dialogues and commentaries, concerned with the role of movement in the study of communality. These considerations are concretised into forms of exchange, hospitality and communal space which operate within, and extends the scope of making and learning institutions in the field of art, design and theory.

In this way, the paper hopes to contribute to the uses of movement in the study of cohabitation, from a transformal, multidisciplinary, transhistoric and intercultural approach to art and philosophy in the field of visual cultures.