What is the Chale Wote Art Festival all about?
For the last nine years the Chale Wote Street Art festival which combines art, music and sometimes the just plain weird and odd of Ghana has inspired and provoked. The festival has always been an alternative platform that helps bring art, music, design, dance and performance out into the streets of James Town. Which is considered one of Accra’s most historic communities. James town can be considered the Camden come 60s Carnaby street Street electic and UK Hoxton hipster area of Accra.
For the week long festival public spaces become art features artists from all over Ghana and the world descend into James Town creating an almost carnival atmosphere which is an amazing experience for your senses. Each year the festival has a theme and the 2019 Chale Wote street art festival is in “Pidgin Imaginarium”
About the 2019 Chale Wote theme Pidgin Imaginarium meaning
Pidgin imaginarium exists within other imaginaria and remains a place of 
refuge, possibility, experimentation and critical insights to overthrow the exploitative hierarchy of the hegemon-led world system. Centuries of resistance has produced this elusive imaginarium for a new world, a fresh start for people on the margins. Pidgin is a time capsule, a time travelling memory repository and a metaphysical extension of many other lifeworlds of creation and exchange. The pidgin imaginarium is a vortex of liberation methods accessible to all. It is a force functioning within other pidgin technologies and translated throughout the autonomous under-land. Pidgin imaginarium seeks no form of control or dominance. It is constantly re-birthing and mutating across geographies. It is the driving force of all liberation technology for communities on the margins and a source of solidarity. This imaginarium is our bridge into the new world we are building. We have taken up the responsibility of our collective dreams of liberation. We are our own liberators. How do we build communities and methods of resistance, around communal labor and aid? How do we liberate our communities from exclusionary social relations and the State? How do we hold up our dreams in a fascist, exploitative, capitalist world?
Africans have had to create alternative worlds of existence to survive through time, non-spaces and under-land lifeworlds of dreams. Such a non-space of refuge is sustained by “vernacular creativity”, a limitless “pidgin technology”, mediating our seemingly permanent state of siege. This requires us thinking about pidgin outside of it being a language, and more as a philosophy of resistance
Read up more about the thinking and creative ideas that were behind the 2019 Chale Wote Street Art Festival
This years festival wants to celebrate and bring to life how Africans all over the world have used their imagination and skills to survive in environments outside their own realities. Remember the Street art festival offers talks and exhibitions all around James Town so you can really immerse yourself!
Considering you take all that in, and you can feel your creative and artistic juices flowing the Chale Wote street art festival is a must see and experience that you have to do this August.
When is the Chale Wote Street art festival
The Chale Wote Festival takes place for in August of every year for one week
Where is it taking place
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James Town – Accra
Author: Kofi Agyemang Ossei
Kofi, is a seasoned traveler who loves to explore Ghana and the world and writes vividly about what he sees. As one of the key people behind viewGhana.com he is always up to something..