Circulation has played a foundational role in hegemonic understandings of global capitalism that basically function as cartographies of empire that map out uneven and differential mobilities.

This podcast is the keynote episode of the Volume on Circulation and Cartographies and explores how freedom remains a scarce and unequally distributed commodity – and how the freedom to move is increasingly becoming the principal stratifier in the longue durée of modernity, coloniality and neo-liberal capitalism in many of our cities. The Volume also seeks to destabilize Global North preoccupations with the spectacle of black death as the principle signifier of African mobility as well as the preoccupation with the large numbers of people from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe moving to the centers of global capital.

Rather, African Mobilities examines the possibilities for creative intervention, strategies of interruption, obstructions, gaps, pauses and logistical counterpoints that contest racial enclosure and strive for a more relational, multi-scalar and multi-sited approach to this contemporary experience of exploded space-time, in which the majority of circulation occurs on the African continent.

These ongoing conversations constitute provisional cartographies of power and desire, raising a number of important questions about which narratives Africans choose to tell, how we tell them, and how so much of our ‘knowledge’ about African cities and architecture is circumscribed by a range of political interests rooted in hegemonic colonial discourses.

A podcast companion to the architecture exhibition, this Volume is a counter-cartography of hegemonic social-spatial relations and representational practices, and begins the work of producing new, alternative practices, knowledges and subjects through a diverse range of spatial practices in the service of a larger emancipatory spatial project in Africa, and beyond.
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The #AfricanMobilities podcast series was made possible by Goethe-Institut Johannesburg in partnership with the Wits University - School of Architecture and Planning, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, Architekturmuseum  de Tum and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

#AfricanMobilities #Circulations #InoperableRelations #XazaarAdjame

#InoperableRelations - AbdouMaliq Simone in conversation with Mpho Matsipa

Justin Garret Moore, architect and urban designer and Executive Director of the NewYork City Public Design Commission joins Dr. Mabel O. Wilson and  Prof. Mario Gooden of the Global Africa Lab to discuss their research and exhibition Im/mobility and the Afro-Imaginary. Their discussion explores the history of racial geography in New York, from redlining to urban renewal, looking at the physical infrastructures of segregation (roadways, expressways, and bridges) as well as the racial demography of COVID-19. New York city has been one of the key locations of both the #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) movement as well as current assorted social justice movements in the wake of the recent police murders of Black Americans coinciding with the global COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the discussion engages concepts of Blackness as a form of #Enclosure and the immobilized Black body, as well as Sylvia Wynter’s concept of the underlife theorized in her unpublished manuscript, Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World.
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The #AfricanMobilities podcast series was made possible by Goethe-Institut Johannesburg in partnership with the Wits University - School of Architecture and Planning, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, Architekturmuseum de Tum and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

#AfricanMobilities #Circulations #Enclosure #GlobalAfricaLab #JustinMoore

#Enclosure: Global African Lab in conversation with Justin Moore

#Enclosure: Global Africa Lab in conversation with Justin Moore

#Enclosure - Global Africa Lab in conversation with Justin Moore

In this podcast, Patti Anahory and César Schofiel Cardoso (Storia na Lugar) join anthropologist Celeste Fortes in conversation on the concept of ‘rabida’ as it relates conditions of islandness and the bidon, a barrel filled with products sent from the diaspora, which becomes a mobile unit of aspirations, a spatial and temporal object of desire(s/d) commodities and geographies. 

Rabida – a term in the Cabo-Verdean language can be loosely translated to turning, rotating, flipping and is linked to notions of circulation, movement, transformation and valuation. It is a concept that crosses temporalities and spatialities. The bidon becomes a link between here and elsewhere/s, complicating the oftentimes fixed boundaries of island geography and imaginings. 

The expression “Si ka badu ka ta biradu”, an ode to Cabo-verdean emigration, is a double entendre meaning both “If one does not leave one cannot return” and “If one does not leave one cannot be transformed”. The expression is a reference to aspirations of social-cultural, economic mobility. 

Together, the notions and the motion of turning and returning also alludes to a process of change, inherent transformation. This turn is deeply connected to the diaspora and its promises, those of transformation and of homecoming. In the current moment of restricted mobility and a time of reconsidering geographies of value, perhaps the expression should be updated to “si ka fikadu ka ta rabidadu”: if one does not stay, one can’t trade/ revalue.

Anahory and Cardoso discuss with Fortes her documentary work, in which she uses the bidon as the vehicle that connects those who stayed and those who are far away. The bidon transports affections and brings “things” sent by those who managed to make it far away,  a symbolic and material embrace, which is also feminine, and  which shortens distances and keeps alight the commitment of connection between here and there.

Circulations

#Rabida - Parenthesis in conversation with Celeste Fortes

Mamadou Jean-Charles Tall, is a Dakar-based co- director of Tall Architectes et Associés, and has been a member of Dak’Art Biennale, he has served as president of the board of the Collège Universitaire d’Architecture de Dakar, an institution that he co-founded, and where
he teaches and is director of the Masters of Architecture programme. Over several decades, he has cultivated an enduring concern for the development of an approach to bio-climatic architecture that is embedded in the transmission of sophisticated African knowledge systems. I sat with Jean Charles Tall virtually, to discuss his ongoing research on bio-climatic architecture and his African Mobilities project that surveyed diverse architectural styles and urban patterns in contemporary Senegal in Migrations and the Image of Space in Senegal
(2018)

African Mobilities 2.0

Transmissions -Jean Charles Tall in conversation with Mpho Matsipa

#Transmissions - Jean-Charles Tall in conversation with Mpho Matsipa

Sammy Baloji and Mpho Matsipa discuss Baloji’s work as it relates to colonialism, extraction and environmental catastrophes. They discuss the interconnectedness of planetary deterioration while working through and beyond the colonial archive, and an exploration of African material futures. 

Baloji’s photographic work, Essay on Urban Planning (2013) for instance, assembles past and present temporalities of  Lubumbashi to show how the urban centre and the peripheral suburbs are separated by a strip of land that  invokes  a wider spectrum of species to reveal the mechanisms of colonial spatial logics embedded in city planning. Baloji’s earlier work leads to a larger body of work with similar sets of concerns, such as Extractive Landscapes (2019), his solo exhibition at Summer Academy at Stadtgalerie Museums pavillon in Salzburg, which addresses the ways in which complex histories are reflected in the landscape, and  how it is inscribed in artefacts and landscapes by showing traces left by mining in the mineral-rich  Congolese province of Katanga. 

Foregrounding prototypes as preliminary versions from which other forms may be developed, this podcast volume on Prototypes creates room to iterate, imagine and improve upon new modes of connecting objects and subjects, materials and societies. 

The discussion reflects on Baloji's understanding of the entanglements  of extraction in the  Democratic Republic of  Congo  with Cold War geo-politics and contemporary global capitalism. Demonstrating this inherent interconnectedness, Other Tales (2020) illustrates his assertion of the importance of decolonial narratives about the Congo, and histories of extraction, Baloji repurposes archival materials and portraiture to surface linkages between the Democratic Republic of Congo’s colonial history and its neo-colonial present. 

Baloji’s creative practice includes orality and mnemonic elements to map memory; and his research practice includes questions about the spiritual and cultural associations that the people in the Katanga region have with their environment. He draws on  Achille Mbembe’s formulation of the shared agency between humans and objects —engages the body not only as a site of possible liberation but also as a site of critique by discussing how objects are animated for human production. 

Using the example of how the digital realm is made possible by violence in the Congo, Baloji foregrounds the fact that the parts required to fabricate mobile phones and computers are inseparable from the exploitation of people and land in central Africa. While exploring ways to access material histories that speak to a larger conversation on the continuous colonial gestures of extraction in terms of residues, waste and toxicity, Baloji speculates on what African material futures might be, that might be rooted in histories of technology that precede the colonial encounter.

#Extraction - Sammy Baloji in conversation with Mpho Matsipa

Doreen Adengo and Zaheer Cassim discuss the impact of multidisciplinary collaboration as materialised in the representation processes and methods employed in the ‘3X3’ project, in which Adengo's team explored how Congolese traders and tailors transform the social, economic, and built environment in Kampala, Uganda.

#StopFrame - Doreen Adengo in conversation with Zaheer Cassim

Paula Nascimento and Maria João Teles-Grilo discuss the concept of the rhizome as explored in the project Beyond Entropy Angola. They explore how ‘Rhizome’ can be understood as a methodology and generator for alternative interventions in the context of urban planning.

#Rhizome : Paula Nascimento in conversation with Maria João Teles-Grilo

Emanuel Admassu discusses his ongoing research project ‘Two Markets’ with Mpho Matsipa. He suggests that Kariakoo in Dar es Salaam and Merkato in Addis Ababa, offer fragmented portals into two sub-Saharan marketplaces, as sites where identities are constructed in urban marketplaces that are continually performing new interpretations of communality and mutuality in ever-shifting zoning systems.

#Tapestry - Emanuel Admassu in conversation with Mpho Matsipa

#Imagination - Jepchumba in conversation with Wale Lawal

The Nest Collective In Conversation (represented by Jim Chuchu, Sunny Dolat, and Njoki Ngumi), considers the effects of borders on relations between and among Africans on the Continent. They discuss how art, culture, language, identity and colonial proximities have made kinships between the Continent and the black diaspora more challenging to explore. They reflect on the need for kind, honest, patient discourse by and among the kinfolk to unpack these ongoing conflicts and tensions.

#Borders - The Nest Collective in conversation (feat. Sunny Dolat, Jim Chuchu and Njoki Ngumi)

#Holes - Blessing Blaai, Kiki Dörman and Solam Mkhabela in conversation

Olalekan Jeyifous and Wale Lawal discuss their collaboration on Mad Horse City. They explore the concept of “Rupture” as a way of simultaneously viewing a future to come and remnants of a time that was. #speculativefutures

#Ruptures - Olalekan Jeyifous and Wale Lawal in conversation.

#CODA -  Ilze Wolff and Mpho Matsipa in conversation

African Mobilities examines the possibilities for creative intervention and strategies of
interruption by way of obstructions, gaps, pauses, and logistical counterpoints that contest
sedimentation and permanent enclosure. It advances towards a more relational, multi-scalar
and multi-sited approach to an exploded space-time through which the majority of circulation
occurs on the African continent. It connects architects and other creative practitioners,
theorists, and scholars from fourteen different locations, including Johannesburg, Kampala,
Addis Ababa, Luanda, Abidjan, Lagos, New York, Dakar, Nairobi, and Praia. Together, we
hope to build a living archive of contemporary African thinking that presents alternative ways
of creating urban realities.

African Mobilities 2.0

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