Between the 13th and the 17th of May 2024, CallFront hosted a week-long international workshop in Paris, focusing on calligraphic practices in the Iberian Peninsula, the Maghrib, and West Africa. This event brought together a panel of specialists in the field, who engaged with the scientific community of Paris and presented their work to a broader audience.
The workshop featured three major events, fostering the dialogue among scholars from diverse disciplines, such as History of Art, History, Paleography, and Anthropology. This interdisciplinary exchange enriched the CallFront corpus of scripts, and encouraged the advancement of research in these areas. Additionally, one of the goals of this workshop was to document some of the West African calligraphic traditions before they disappear, as they have in other regions.
West African manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France
The first event was held on May 14th at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where the CallFront team was welcomed by Khalid Chakor Alami, in charge of the Persian and Arabic manuscript collections. This work session was led by Susana Molins Lliteras (University of Cape Town) and Mauro Nobili (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), who examined several West African manuscripts. The following manuscripts were given a particular attention: BnF Arabe 402[1], BnF Arabe 509[2], and BnF Arabe 6869[3].
