African Mobilities 2.0

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.

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.

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)

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

_____________________________________________________________

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

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.

___________________________________________________________

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

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.

___________________________________________________________

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