Adama Sanneh on the power of creativity as a tool for social change

"To create is likewise to give shape to one's faith."

Adama Sanneh, the co-founder and CEO of the Moleskine Foundation began his 2021 TEDxBergamo talk with this quote by French philosopher Albert Camus. He came across it when he was in high school and it made something click for him - it was the first time he had realised the importance of creativity and more specifically, the connection that existed between creativity and his future. 

Later on, Sanneh would go on to graduate in Linguistic and Cultural Mediation from the University of Milan, get a Master’s degree in public management (MPM) from the Bocconi School of Management and a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Geneva. After working in management and strategy consulting roles for various public and not-for-profit (NPO) organisations such as the UN, he went on to co-found the Moleskine Foundation - an NPO that offers unconventional programs to unlock creative skills in youth and communities for positive social change. Sanneh has since carried his zeal for art throughout his career and has continued to promote art as a vital tool for education and social change throughout his travels across the world. 

The Demonstration at Constitution Hill, hosted by the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA), was a 10-day series of events that opened on September 15. As a part of the museum’s NMAFA+ series, the event included an exhibition, public conversations and artist-led city tours. After the Moleskine Foundation and Simon Njami’s AtWork academy, and in the lead-up to the 10th Basha Uhuru festival, the events were focused on The Smithsonian-aligned theme of Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past. The initiative aimed to highlight systemic racism and racial inequity across the Smithsonian Institution, in America and globally using art and creativity to spark conversations. The South African visual artist and cultural curator, Siwa Mgoboza, curated The Demonstration, which includes the culmination of he and Njami’s AtWork programme.

Featured artists, selected for their boundary-pushing and conversation-provoking work, included Blessing Ngobeni, Patrick Bongoy, Luke Radloff, Nelisiwe Xaba, Mocke Jansen van Veuren and Ayana V Jackson. 

What does the theme/initiative of Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past mean to you? 

Dealing with our racial past is undoubtedly one of the preconditions to building our collective future.

Dealing with this topic means delving into our history to forge and refresh those intellectual tools needed to face the issue. At the same time, there is a less explored dimension: the emotional, the personal and the psychological. This second one is often less explored, as it is more difficult and riskier to deal with. This initiative dared to delve into both dimensions through art and creativity.

As a Senegalese and Italian, and from the first generations of Black Italians, the element of race is not only a political or historical issue to reckon with, but rather a deeply personal matter that has shaped my journey. So I don’t find this topic and initiative only effective as an artistic proposition, but also as a trigger to start a deep personal exploratory journey.

You describe yourself as ‘globalised’ and ‘cosmopolitan’. Can you elaborate?

Growing up, I struggled with the apparent contradictions that characterised me: black and Italian, African and European, black and bourgeois, to name a few, were oxymorons growing up. 

Nevertheless, I realised later in life that my position, not being able to fit in or not being “expected”, allowed me to see through the artificial societal construction early on that ignited my still-occurring liberation journey. It is precisely through or thanks to those contradictions that I accelerated the creation of a “somehow conscious” personal gaze. 

What work does the Moleskine Foundation do, how are you involved and what do you aim to solve or promote? 

I am the co-founder and CEO of the Moleskine Foundation, but long before that, I was in the first cohort of volunteers of lettera27, an organisation that was later transformed into the Moleskine Foundation in 2006. In the following 10 to 12 years, I went on my own path, but, as every first love, this experience with lettera27 remained with me.

I worked in development in emergency relief; I completed my masters, worked for the UN and had the chance to build the first of my career before they asked me to rethink the foundation’s strategy. Within a few years, the Moleskine Foundation was born and evolved into the unique model we have today.

I call it a love story, because everyone involved were people I love, respect and still stay in touch with today.

The larger vision of the Moleskine Foundation is to be a cultural institution that inspires a new generation of creative thinkers and doers, which is what we call anyone who can master the creative skills of critical thinking, lifelong learning, creativity and a change-making attitude. We support spaces where criticality and imagination occur and we believe above anything else that creativity can be the drive to build our collective future in a more equitable society.

What do you envision in the future for yourself, for the Moleskine Foundation? 

First and foremost, we want to continue showcasing the power of creativity for social change through our programming, but especially through the unique creative organisations that have been using creativity and culture to transform their communities for many years. Still, the international community and the philanthropic and social innovation world have been discarding them, because of their unconventional approaches.

Our main goal is to bring light to all these experiences that contribute to solving the biggest issues that the world is facing through culture and creativity.

The current development and social innovation models have reached their limit. Making those models more efficient won’t help. Now is the time for imagination.

We believe that we need to bring light to those spaces around the world, so that those who have the resources, capital and influence can finally recognise their immeasurable value and start investing seriously in the sector.

The AtWork programme and The Demonstration really stressed the importance of collaboration. Can you elaborate on the partnerships that allowed these events to happen?

I know Ngaire [Blankenberg, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art] and Dawn [Robertson, the CEO of The Constitution Hill Human Rights Precinct] well. We come from very diverse and unique backgrounds, and our mindsets and purposes aligned quite quickly.

This partnership has the purpose not only in its declared objectives but also in the subtext that it entails. How do we make sure our claim that creativity can change the world and be embodied by our organisations? How do we build creative institutions? This initiative embodies these ambitions.

Three different organisations — a European foundation, a public American museum and a South African institution — guided by people with unconventional and diverse backgrounds decided to think and do together. As normal as it sounds, it’s quite revolutionary.