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Taking the position of a speculative non-coloniality as a point of departure, They Who Dream of Waves: A Concise Guide to Afro-Asia is a hybrid essay-fiction that situates historical Afro-Asian affinities as a network of intense, intimate cultural and logistics exchanges that predates and transcends Western colonial impulses, and reimagines new possibilities of solidarities. By centring and problematising the notion of the African continent itself as a variegated site of diverse cosmologies and tensions, this piece traces both the cultural and historical genealogies of the African diaspora within Asia as a way of drawing into view how imaginaries of Africa have been created and maintained, and thus how new alliances can form without reliance on the contingencies of Western modes of being. In resonance with the idea of a radical disembodiment that bypasses colonial constructs of spatiality and temporality, They Who Dream of Waves posits that the creation of African spaces (or rather, spaces of Africanity) is as much an exercise in discursive creations as it is a vibrant, sensual act of worlding that embraces diversity but acknowledges the need for granularity so that a true, equitable polyphony of narratives may emerge.

Having read the project description of ‘Disembodied Territories’ I was immediately reminded of Katherine McKittrick’s reflection on Dionne Brand’s text ‘Land to Light On’. In the introductory chapter of ‘Demonic Grounds’ she reflects on how Brand’s work “not only refuses a comfortable belonging to nation, or country, or a local street, she alters them by demonstrating that geography, the material world, is infused with sensations and distinct ways of knowing” (McKittrick, 2006: ix). Based on this reflection, and the themes and questions that ‘Disembodied Territories’ seeks to navigate, I am interested in offering a visual and sonic, black feminist experimental cinematic exploration of relationships between black subjectivity and black, migratory geographies as a way to rethink, remap and visualise the oppositional geographies of urban Johannesburg.

Through an experimental black feminist cinematic grammar that centres intimacy and an ordinary set of affects, I am interested in exploring the formation of black femme geographies (in the context of migration) amongst the violent, masculinised constructions of urbanity. Loosely based on previous ethnographic research, current research, as well as my own experience of the city, I hope to turn to the possibilities of experimental cinematic practice as a means to unearth the intimate relationships that shape these physical and imaginative oppositional geographies. This practice also centres relationships between black cinematic temporality and sonic frequencies to shape a filmic practice that refuses chronological time and favours a tense-less impermanence, perpetual restlessness and fragmentation (Campt, 2017 & Nyong’o, 2018). Through these provocations, I aim to construct a black feminist reading of the cinematic and the geographic to consider a nuanced language for thinking about black women and femme bodies enacting resistance though the everyday, intimate sites outside of Western, hegemonic constructions of space.

My contribution focuses on the question of ruination as a keyword to make sense of the affective and material relationship to cityness in Egypt. I use ruination in the sense developed by Ann Laura Stoler. In Imperial Debris (2013) and Duress (2016), Stoler differentiates between ruins and ruination. Ruins, she argues, invite a privileged sense of reflection. Ruination, by contrast, emphasises by a critical positioning of the present within violent structures. In this sense, ruination is an ongoing process with multiple temporalities at work. This understanding, I find, empowers a critical engagement with processes of material and social undoing that divests from a fascination with ruins and questions the political complicity in processes of ruination instead (Stoler 2013, 9-11). This understanding intersects with Yael Navaro-Yashin’s use of the concept as a metaphor in studying abject space (2012, 170). Navaro-Yashin’s ethnographic use emphasises the sense of aftermath, ‘material remains or artefacts of destruction and violence’ (2012, 162) as well as ‘subjectivities and residual affects that linger, like a hangover, in the aftermath of violence’ (2012, 162). While these two theoretical inspirations intersect, I am primarily interested in the complex and non-linear temporalities that bear weight on the present and the future. The way I combine the question of materiality and affect is through a concept of geopoetics and in this piece I want to focus on a geopoetics of dust. I will use this to think about Ruination as promise and hope, and the leftover of ruination, dust or clutter, both circulating in Cairene spaces.

My contribution pivots mainly around understanding space and creating possible methods of engaging with and configuring that space, in an attempt to understand and “humanize” the urban space in Cairo. I have been trying to experiment and expand the ways through which my experience of the city as a citizen overlaps and informs my artistic interests and concerns.

Since Cairo's long and tortured urbanization and modernization, has tended to serve automobiles as the dominant 'user', cycling, walking and other human-scale activities have turned to being acts of resistance/resilience to reclaiming the right to the city. A particular game of skipping hurdles with the ever-changing city. I began to play this game in navigating Cairo to create/rebuild human landscape as an attempt to confront the limitations and constraints of the city. I then translate the experience into my alternative maps of the space and build different connections within the city.

When they
would put their feet at the back of my chair and kick me
it wasn’t them you talked to, it was me
When they
would make fun of my name
it wasn’t them you they talked to, it was me
When they
would mock me for the tone of my skin
it wasn’t them you talked to, it was me

The notion of the Black Brit is a confusing one. An identity that replicates the arbitrary boundaries drawn across Africa, shoving colonised bodies into a category contingent on the colonial core. The Black Brit is engaged in a constant battle to reassert itself as a legitimate identity. But is it legitimate? As Paul Gilroy (1993) notes, "the fundamental, time-worn assumption of homogenous and unchanging black communities […] proved to be a fantasy" (p.1). This is a category made up of pasts and presents fragmented by ethnic, historical and geographical location. This work disembodies the Black Brit by delegitimising it - where legitimacy is an appeal for recognition from the colonial masters who marked us and drew us to this land. I take the Black Brit's incoherence as its major resistive strength and seek out the sites of its discombobulation. Beginning with a conversation between myself and others about upbringing, day to day lives, passions and dislikes, our influences. Africa is extracted from its spatial location and contorted by these individuals in its conflict with Britain. In presenting this disjointed roundtable the viewer sees our similarities and differences constantly making and unmaking the Black Brit.

My work examines ever-proliferating temporalized categories of criminalization in colonial and so-called “post-colonial” Lagos nightlife – “found at night”, “nightwalker”, “wandering”, “found without a lamp”, “unattached / unescorted women”, “without visible means of livelihood”, “loitering”, “wayward”, “unable to give an account of oneself”. From early colonial ordinances that forced Black African residents to hold torches when out at night, to the arrests of women for prostitution or loitering for being outside after dusk, to the closing of streets by informal neighborhood night guards, a plethora of apparatuses have sought to channel and circumscribe the uses of the night in Lagos and beyond, reconfiguring each night the geography of the city and demarcating this temporality as a site of suspicion and excess. Yet, I also excavate an insistent, insurgent refusal to vacate the night outdoors by Lagosians, despite a de facto criminalization of the night. Nighttime has often functioned as a privileged timespace of Black possibility, not as a site in which terror is absent or as the ground of some romance of resistance, but as a site in which terror is nowhere as inextricably linked to the specter or promise of an otherwise, a reprieve, an insistent life-making, and a disavowal of an order of things, which is also an order of times. If, as Fanon articulates in the Wretched of the Earth (1963), “the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in the morning”, how might we reckon with the logics which produce nighttime as a site of suspicion, excess but also potentially subversive world-making?

We spoke to some of the most exciting scholars and practitioners about mapping, space, power, coloniality and the African continent/diaspora. 

Mbembe writes “narrative about Africa is always pretext for a comment about something else, some other place, some other people. More precisely, Africa is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its subjectivity (Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 3).

In this sense Africa, though relegated to the position of the unthought, nevertheless remains vital to what Henri Lefebvre terms as the ‘mental space’ defining theoretical practice and knowledge of the world. There is an abyss between the mental sphere on one hand and the physical and social sphere’s on the other (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 6). So what of the narratives of spatial agents in Africa? My project will therefore be a written piece that reflects on the abyss between mental space and their realities.

By talking through the production of my film Black Horizon, first screened at the 2019 Lagos Biennial made in collaboration with a group of young artists in Lagos, living in the wreckage of the entangled forces of geological and logistical processes, I intend on drawing attention to some of the practices of worlding of spatial agents present in West Africa’s physical and social spheres that exceed the Western imaginary.

This project is motivated by an interest in understanding the movement of people through the dispersal of botanic species across continents. Diasporic journeys can be traced and retraced by the ways in which plants have travelled from Africa to the Americas, as seeds were carried by enslaved Africans to the colonies. In transporting seeds with them, Africans were able to bring local knowledges with them to the colonies, resisting attempts by European slavers to strip the memory of their homelands from them while simultanenously shaping the future agricultural landscape of the Americas. 

This project will examine the legacy that  botanic species have imprinted on the Americas through collage, mapping their journeys through words and images. This is done as a way of challenging colonial notions of land and property ownership in the Caribbean, relying instead on embodied forms of knowledge and oral history as a way of understanding space.

If landscape is a way of seeing that we learn, I see a Somaliland that is inextricably linked with England. I learned to make Xawaash in England, and yet it is also a reminder of a home, or at least of a landscape that is not English. When we as a family go for walks in the beautiful English countryside around Bristol, I always take a flask of shaah or chai. I grew up drinking shaah, the tea my mother made for guests. My boys now associate country walks with shaah as does my English husband; it is the only time I make it. I think there is something beautiful in this, a Somali trace of spiced tea in the rural English landscape. T.S. Eliot articulates the complexities of this migration well: The migrations of modern times […] have transplanted themselves according to some social, religious, economic or political determination or some peculiar mixture of these. There has therefore been something in the re-movements analogous in nature to religious schism. The people have taken with them only a part of the total culture […] The culture which develops on the new soil must therefore be bafflingly alike and different from the parent culture. Wherever people migrate, there will always be gaps in the availability of foodstuffs, some seemingly essential items that cannot be transported or do not grow well in the new environment. For my mother, who grew up as a goat herder on the Ethiopian/Somali border, fresh camel milk has a strong association with the Somali landscape; since leaving Somaliland, this camel milk has become, for her, imbued with mystical powers. Camels are so important to sustaining Somali nomads that there are forty-six different words for camel. My mother firmly believes fresh camel milk cures all sorts of ailments, and she laments its loss. The loss is far greater than just camel milk: it is a loss of home, a loss so keenly felt that my mother (along with a generation of her peers) took up a recipe for camel milk, consisting of the following unlikely but available ingredients: a dash of 7-Up, natural yoghurt, salt, and water. Imagine our excitement each Ramadan when she brought out the ‘camel milk’. For children of the African diaspora this idea of home, of this ‘parent culture’, is entwined with food.

As a Black/African feminist geographer who is interested in cities, Afro-futurism and Black futurity, I spend a lot of my time thinking about what African cities can look like. Specifically, I challenge urban Afropolitan Imagineering projects that engage with familiar orientations (Ahmed 2006) of Euro-patriarchal capitalism. As such, I get excited when I see things like the market scenery in the movie Black Panther and some of Architect Olalekan Jeyifuous’s work. These are examples that disinherit the familiarity of Eurocentric geographic determinism – because they do not look like the “urban” that is imagined/promoted by development.I am really interested in contributing to disembodied territories because when I read the call, it brought to mind my experience of a talk where I showed pictures of Jeyifuous’s work to practically a sea of white faces. There is one particular look of disgust that remains indelible in my mind. Many were mostly aghast that I called the drawings beautiful. I was focused on the possibility of an urban future, one that did not normalize “overdevelopment, accumulation, and … [consumption] as identifiable–seeable locales of emancipation,” (McKittrick 2011:950). They probably wanted to see a particular aesthetic. I denied them this. My proposed contribution will take the form of story-telling, real and imagined, that flirts with the idea of an otherwise African urban future.

Slavery in the Cape Colony was officially the central form of social, cultural and economic organization from 1658 – 1834, and vital to the production of many of the key architectural sites from this period. In 1834, slavery was replaced by a system of indentured labour, a continuation of the slave system in all but name. While slavery and associated forms of racialized forced labour are largely represented as mild in early architectural histories of southern Africa, if present at all, there are moments when tracings, slippages and holes in the historical narratives point to stores of revolt, violence, and precarious yet peripheral care. The manor house of Waterhof, for instance, is described by architectural historian Dorothea Fairbridge (1922) as follows: “Waterhof is a place wherein to see visions and dream dreams. Legend says that you may hear the pattering footsteps of the mutinous slaves wherever you care to listen for them.” I am intrigued by these “footsteps”, and those who “care to listen for them”; and beyond the specific histories of this particular house, how similar stories emerge of various similar spaces, and the wider geographies where slaves were captured from, and the places where refuge was sought. This proposal asks how architectural history might contend with these ghost stories and hauntings. Rather than understanding the inability to know ‘fully’ as disabling, I am interested in thinking through the fictions of history, to draw on Gayatri Spivak, as a means to push back against epistemic violence of disciplinary constraints, and begin to re-map these architectures.

Data: The New Black Gold emerged out of a longer line of research that examines the data economy in West Africa. Tracing the history of oil production in Nigeria revealed the complex relationship between exploitation, wealth and environment. I explored how multinational corporations were taking land and taking control of public data. As a reaction to the research I began creating rudimentary scanning devices that could allow the public to collect and control their own data. While developing scans of popular markets in Lagos I realised that there was a whole other narrative emerging within the project. There was a glitch in the quality of scans, due to the voids in the data collected. It became evident that scanning softwares have embedded visual biases in contrasting spaces.When scanning Balogun Market in Lagos —the cars, okada’s, keke’s, and stalls— appear glitched. This highlights tensions between the landscape and the technology. While Data: the New Black Gold began as a speculative project, it opens up a lot of questions on Eurocentric mapping ideologies and western cartographic tools. I would like to contribute to Disembodied Territories a Virtual Reality space. This will be an immersive walk-through extension of the original film.

What are you? Often grappling with my identity, coming from a niche that most Africans and Arabs alike are unfamiliar with, I constantly struggle with defining my identity. Am I African, am I Yemeni, am I neither, am I both? It is offensive that I am forced to define my identity per Western constructions of space. Why does my African identity end at the Red Sea? Why do maps of Africa not include African diasporas? We are confined to recognizable spaces to fit ideologies permeated by Western ways of knowing, of categorizing the particulars of varying cultures. I cannot, therefore, be easily confined to pre-determined conventions of what an area/region should consist of and its perceived cultural characteristics. However, the situation is more complicated than the desire for African inclusion. Ethiopia, like Egypt, often considers itself non-African; the result of perceived elitism imposed via colonial racism and reinforced by Orthodox Christianity. The problem is ancient, when “Ethiopia” was more generally north of its current capital, especially during the time of what preceded and shaped the Aksumite empire. Any place in Africa associated with the word “empire”, per archaeology, is never considered an “African empire”, because Africa doesn’t have empires and therefore Saba and Aksum can’t be African. Western modes of place categorization do not fit into this complicated scheme and only further convolute my identity. The reality is that I am African wherever I am, not where Western borders of ideological space impose themselves. My essay will examine how this complicated history can't be defined per the Western understanding of space-time, as well as how my particular identity can be understood as a case study for demonstrating the limitations of the Western episteme in Northeast Africa/Yemen/South Arabia.

As Zimbabweans navigate cycles of hyper-inflation, emergent technologies afford new ways to self-sustain and make place, while negotiating precarity and “other side of the border” opportunities. Attentive to the precarity of Black cross-border mobility, this project foregrounds how mobile phone technologies (re)configure the ways people relate to each other, move through space (including the space of the Zimbabwean diaspora) and challenge pre-existing state controlled economic institutions. I focus on cross-border running— a process and set of infrastructures wherein members of a new class of Zimbabwean entrepreneurs called runners are sourced online via Facebook or WhatsApp to procure goods from grocery and household stores in South Africa that cannot be sourced locally, on a commission basis for customers in Zimbabwe. I track how these goods are transported illicitly over the border through a network of informal relationships between runners, bus drivers and border officials and which (in)equalities are made visible in the spaces across which they operate. In an essay that centers ethnographic fragments from my PhD research, I will foreground questions of mobility across physical and social (classed) spaces with a special emphasis on runners’ movements across the Zimbabwe-South Africa border.

I have this running joke with friends that I tell time and know what day of the week it is by staring at my indoor laundry hanger. I count pairs of socks to know if it's Tuesday or Thursday. Watch garments slowly disappearing like memories that over the years I have trapped in a scarf or a shirt or spritz of perfume. I tell them that this fragile and sturdy apparatus that folds up against a wall or behind a door, that carries the weight and water of my memories, standing for hours on end patiently for the sun to smile through my balcony reminds me of the collective reality of immigrants everywhere surviving in exile and abroad....

How might the everyday lived experiences of Black women reimagine approaches to public policy that continue to perpetuate violence as normative development, whilst on-the-ground understandings and imaginaries of safety constantly shift? How might we recognise and centre this dynamic characteristic of context as a means of refiguring meaning and nuance into the development of safe spaces? This proposal extends on the research surrounding the platform ‘public aGender’ which the author created as a digital ethnographic approach to better understanding the spatial perspectives of Black women Gender-based survivors in Cape Town. Identifying an ethical gap in fieldwork processes, the platform begs spatial practice to listen to context and mould its processes according to its pre-existing rules, pace and rituals. Employing collage as a means of visualising challenges, ideas and fantasies around safety; the platform situates itself as both conduit and vessel. As a tapestry of narratives interwoven and viewed collectively, it acts as a conduit for storytellers to share their experiences and understandings of the city. As an ongoing and open repository, it acts as a vessel holding the fluidity of everyday life. This proposal reflects on public aGender as an evolving case study for subverting single tick-box understandings of safety and violence that tend to be overlooked at public policy level, and consequently hinder the development and fruition of safe spaces or counterpublics (Fraser, 1990) that could subvert the oppressive nature of infrastructure in South Africa to become one that departs from mutual understandings of joy.

In my essay exploring the possibilities of curating a counter-archive that centers Black and Indigenous women in the re-telling of Canada’s history as a settler-colonial nation, I end with an acknowledgment that “to curate as a Black Canadian working with Black and Indigenous artists is different from curating as an Igbo woman alongside Inuk and Plains Cree artists.” As my contribution to Disembodied Territories, I would like to take this line of thinking further and write a speculative text (most likely a conversation with one of the artists from the exhibition, an Inuk woman who has become a dear friend) that re-imagines and invents what the latter experience would have been like. Rather than Wynter’s triadic model of European-Negro-Indian – and later Fred Wilderson’s Red, White and Black – this piece (whatever shape it ends up taking) would explore the possibilities of a dyadic Negro-Indian, or Red-Black, or African-Native or Igbo-Inuk (as an example), in ways that de-center and de-stabilize not only our understandings of how we have come (and can come) to be together, but also of place, of migration, of relation. Aiming to step outside of the master’s house – if even for a moment, if only for a glimpse—the piece will tell the story of an encounter between an Igbo and Inuk woman that we were never given the opportunity to experience.

I work from the realm of dreams. My work is primarily ancestral instruction I am permitted to translate into the language of my experiences. I meet my ancestors in my dreams and they show me an expansive universe, where the past, present, and future happen all at once, because time is not linear and forever is now. In my dreams, I collaborate with my people to build new worlds and reclaim dignity. ULI KWINA would be a deeply personal 3-6 piece surrealist photographic series that intimately explores my dreams and collaborative process with the divine, incorporating symbolism from Ngonde ontology and dream interpretations. When I consider Disembodied Territories, I immediately think of my dreamscape. It is the meeting place for both the dead and the living, spirit and flesh. A place that is not bound by the laws of physics or materiality. Where once lost or destroyed or stolen places, people, artefacts, or stories can return anew, restored by time. The tangible body transforms into both a vessel and map for the intangible. The dreamscape is a shapeshifting meeting place, one both mind and spirit can reconfigure at will.

My doctoral research explores the visual narratives of authenticity invested in and mobilised through the shweshwe textile in contemporary South Africa. Shweshwe is a resist-dyed cotton fabric that is industrially manufactured in Zwelitsha township in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. The textile is increasingly understood as an indigenous textile, principally associated with black women’s traditional rite of passage into marriage although with an ever-widening range of uses to mark a distinctly afrocentric South African sartorial aesthetic. However, for much of the 19th century and well into the first half of the 20th century, what we now call shweshwe was a copywritten calico blueprint produced in Lancashire, England, by the Calico Printers Association. Printed onto calicos made from American cotton, by the early 20th century, the British sought to establish cotton mills in various parts of the British Empire to reduce Lancashire’s reliance on American cottons. However, it is important to note that in the mid-19th century, virtually all the blue-print cottons that arrived in the Cape of Good Hope (modern day Cape Town) arrived with German missionaries who required black converts to acquire European dress as one of the key markers of the their Christianisation (read civilisation).

We spoke to some of the most exciting scholars and practitioners about mapping, space, power, coloniality and the African continent/diaspora. 

We spoke to some of the most exciting scholars and practitioners about mapping, space, power, coloniality and the African continent/diaspora. 

I used to think that if anything ever happened to me, the first people the Police would speak to would be the minibus taxi drivers on the Claremont-Cape Town route, which I took every day as student to go to University in Rondebosch. They would have been the first and last to see me. That’s the kind of thought that comes to mind when you are a foreign young woman, on your own, travelling daily to and fro in a strange city known as «rape town», in a world whose languages you have yet to master. Yes, I am African, but this is not the Africa I know. For the Disembodied Territories call, I propose to write a short essay (800-1,000 words) excerpted above: a meditation on navigating an African city I knew little about, as a young university student in a country other than my own. In the beginning, I didn’t know how to read a post-apartheid city such as Cape Town, and so I navigated the city on the basis of trust. I later realised that I was so evidently foreign, that the naiveté must have protected me. I looked “coloured”, but my Mozambican accent gave me away. I looked at people in the eyes when others would have averted the gaze and/or crossed over to the other side of the street. Nevertheless, being a young woman in a city infamous for high rape statistics, safety was a concern and would later determine how I mapped the city: ensuring I had witnesses.

Maintenance has a central role in my worldview. I owe that to my parents. In this self-reflective essay, I describe how maintenance of human and technical relationships is part of my parents’ way of being, an ethos that I believe, is truly African. Education, however, is not a mere transmission of information, values and practices. Accordingly, in revisiting my memories I conceptualise how I have been transforming such values. For me, maintenance is a spectrum of practices that aim at keeping the value of relationships by means of a constant conversation, whether relationships are with people or with objects, individual or collective.“Maintenance: an African philosophy of design” is about the role of caring regarding everyday things; everyday things that are often overlooked in modern society, but that are crucial for making life functional, sometimes even more appreciated.

In the summer of 2020 a petition circulated by the far-right group ‘Britain First’, requested signatures in support of the removal of the statue of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square. It was widely shared by people like Kim Kendall, a senior lawyer for the U.K. government’s Crown Prosecution Service. The letter situated the request on the premise set up by the Black Lives Matter protests, who over the summer of 2020 had called for the removal of statues of controversial historical figures who were complicit in practices of slavery and racial subjugation. It took to recognise the power projected by monumental figures of history through their figuration within the public space of the city. Seeking to cast Mandela’s bronze cast to the ground, the petition argued that such an act was necessary for him to be, ‘torn down and cast into the dustbin of history’, due to his being ‘a communist and terrorist mass murderer’.

I offer this text as an activity of sharing.

                  I offer this text as a wilful motion of spiralling through incompleteness against mastery.i




I insist upon my right to be multiple

I insist upon my right to be multiple

Even more so, I insist upon

The recognition of my multiplicity

[...]

I can also, also, also, also, and, and, and, and

Against the backdrop of the bordered and extractive histories and presence of European colonialism, enslavement, and genocide, sitting in a prison in the 1970s Huey P Newton – Black Panther co-founder and errant child of African diaspora – imagined the world otherwise. Newton’s theory of ‘intercommunalism’, as fleshed out in his writings and speeches, dislodged the then popular notion that anti-colonial nationalism was the antidote to Euro-American empire, but at the same time managed to question the legitimacy of a borderless world in which racial capitalism was the only currency. Drawing on his thought, this piece explores the promise of a rupture from Eurocentric conceptions of time and space.Specifically, by thinking with and through Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s postulation that “freedom is a place”, the piece asks how ‘abolition’ can help complicate and disrupt dominant understandings of boundaries and European territoriality. It posits a different way of ‘place-making’ one in which ‘Africa’ does not stand as synecdoche for ‘oppressed’.

We will explore the complexities of making place amidst catastrophe and/or devastation. Central to our exploratory investigation is a focus on what building means in the context of space-making practices. Through this poetic experimentation we will tease out what building other futures—and here we understand building in an expansive sense—might look and feel like. Some of the questions we will explore are: how has black life in the diaspora envisioned another mapping of the world that reckons with the long durée of extractive and toxic colonialism—whose logics have historically and presently relegated black life to particular times and spaces of devastation? In what ways have Africans both on the Continent and in the Diaspora responded to ruptures, wounds, and gaps? What does it mean for us to make life happen in the wake of and/or amidst (neo-)colonial practices of place annihilation? How does one narrate place-making in spaces that have been marked as “uninhabitable”? What does maintaining a conceptual separation between space and place enable when the material of building still echoes expansive colonial logic?

Ever since I decided to focus on knowledges and experiences of peoples of African descent to make sense of the world (i.e. a non-exhaustive understanding of epistemic Blackness), I keep on thinking about how much time we could have saved. In our sense-making. In our sense-making-for-change at the service of the will-to-life (Dussel, 2008).“You already know enough”, writes Lindqvist in Exterminate All the Brutes ([1992] 2007, p.2). “So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.”In my contribution I seek to both complicate and walk with this provocation-invitation. Complicate by acknowledging that we are engaging in sense-making on the ruins of epistemicide, of Black epistemes in particular; walk-with, by acknowledging that the knowledges are nevertheless there, both very present and hidden in plain sight. I offer curated narratives, building on my father’s life stories as a Rwandan-in/after-exile as well as autobiographical examples of my everyday: traveling/researching/teaching/reporting-while-Black. I aim to engage what Ndlovu-Gatsheni and wa Thiong’o have conceptualised the colonial and decolonisation to be: dis-memberment and re-mebering respectively and think through the implications for knowledge-making at the service of the will-to-life from ‘disembodied African’ loci of enunciation.

We went to Tiznit – a historical center of North African jewellery making – looking for the ‘cloisonné’ enamel technique, found only in specific and unrelated regions of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. We took Ahmed Bouanani’s drawings of traditional jewellery with us. He made them in the 1960s, as a record of something doomed to disappear. Today around Tiznit the craftsmen’s villages are indeed empty. Many techniques are forgotten. Jewellery is losing its place in social ritual, becoming a merely commercial sector. But keen eyes and dextrous hands remain, as does the habit of melting down old pieces to create new ones. Neither the makers nor the users of these objects fetishize them. They leave authenticity to the anthropologists. Artisans are not the keepers of a temple, but the heirs of skills they constantly revitalize. Inspired by this, we forsook the melancholy search and turned to invention instead. If jewellery is a language, with a syntax of materials, forms and techniques, we could perhaps – with the help of a master craftsman – write new sentences. Create our own authentically false pieces. Make speculative fiction out of the extant scraps of a dying heritage.

We spoke to some of the most exciting scholars and practitioners about mapping, space, power, coloniality and the African continent/diaspora. 

‘Water No Get Enemy: Counter-Cartographies of Diaspora’ aims to develop a model of resistance to neo-colonial practices of crude oil extraction and ecocide in the Niger Delta. By learning from indigenous epistemologies archived in Nigerian masquerade, the project proposes a new masquerade: a method of cartography that critiques harmful extractive practices by bringing multiple diasporic sites into dialogue through performance. ‘Water No Get Enemy’ proposes an innovative method of analysing resource relations between extractors and sites of extraction. This is a call to rethink our relationship to resource use, the role that previous extractive architectural technologies have played in this space and the potential of a renewed relationship to indigenous knowledge as a serious form of spatial practice.I intend to develop this project further with Disembodied Territories, by advancing the short film I have already created into a more detailed ethnographic study. I will go into more depth regarding the colonial cartography that has abstracted the land for the purposes of extraction. In addition to further exploring the indigenous cartographic practice of Kalabari masquerades that resists this extraction, through performance, costume and conversation which are spatial technologies of analysis, projection and recreation.

This essay describes the death of a woman in a neighborhood of urban renewal in Ethiopia’s capital city. Rahel left Addis Ababa in 2006 as a twenty-year-old young woman to work as an undocumented domestic migrant laborer in Beirut. After she had a stroke, she became paralyzed and died soon after in 2016. Her attempts of trying to return when she fell ill failed. Even once dead, her body was not easily brought back home. Stuck in Beirut because of faulty documentation, and then at customs in Addis Ababa, her body began to decompose.

In describing how the neighborhood organized the funeral and mourned not only the death of these individuals, but the vanishing of the neighborhood, I highlight the disposability that gendered and racialized bodies are often subjected to. Treated as surplus, the push and refusal to disappear becomes increasingly definitional of their circulation.

The views in which surveys are taken hold within them power to attribute value to space. This project proposes a questioning of the value assigned to land and its virtual construction in drawings or maps. Ideally held as a series of ‘growing cartographies’ (produced as a series of simple moving GIFs), this creative piece aims to, for a fleeting view, will into existence, sight and value that which has been unseen, overlooked or folded within, under or between the visible registrations of measurable, ‘surveyable’ property. The top-down gaze of land surveys is challenged, through new strange surveys which occupy the edges, folds, tears of and undersides of maps deliberately articulating altered perspectival views into and under fascinating spaces of lesser-known value production; to potential inscribe those of unseen labouring or the fluid yet tangible value of cultural exchanges which aggregate particularly in Johannesburg’s inner city. The current plan is to focus on Ethiopian and Somali markets which occupy high-rise buildings off Jeppe St in Johannesburg, to draw out and show the unregistered value of vertical surfaces that are occupied for display, transaction and strategic positioning. These include footwear, spices and fabric shops, as well as signmarkings for wayfinding and advertising purposes. Many of these spaces are claimed insurgently, somewhat defiantly, of ideas of ‘Gross Lettable Area’, finding new surfaces for value production. The intention is not so much to survey these spaces, rather than to use what is already happening in these spaces as a spatial counteract to destabilise the power of the top-down survey The drawings that are proposed would manipulate and distort land-survey languages, to speculate new sites, and new measuring methods, of economic value production of property beyond the sterility of erf lines, square meterage, or coordinate positions. This project seeks to find and represent (albeit precariously) other elusive ‘lands’ which hold value in dynamic,messy ways which challenge colonial rationalities of valuation.

We spoke to some of the most exciting scholars and practitioners about mapping, space, power, coloniality and the African continent/diaspora.
 

I propose a visual contribution that supports a radical reimagination of the terrain of anti-carceral and anti-imperial action. By centering the disconnected diaristic writings and biographies of women of African descent who live(d) as political prisoners, I envision a map that connects both the temporal and geographic realities of African women’s political activism and defiance. The map joins Lucy Parsons and Assata Shakur (U.S.A 1913, 1970s) to Gambo Sawaba (Nigeria 1960s), to recently imprisoned transwoman, Shakiro, (Cameroon, 2021) to illuminate the colonial logic of incapacitation-cum-extraction, racialization, and sexed labeling. Simultaneously, the work should allow observers to piece together the methods of sexual definition, surveillance and intrusion that states use to suppress African women’s public anti-imperialism and revolutionary thought. I would like to highlight the criminalizing mechanisms stemming from the colonial carceral legacy that attempts to sort racialized bodies into troubled sexes and continually subject us to particular laws, such as public indecency or nuisance, to entrap people in jails, prisons and the cyclical carcerality of economic retribution. With the visual component, I hope to communicate that women and genderqueer people of African descent have been naming prisons as a central place of perpetual imperialist oppression, which outlasts the traditional temporal bounds of Western colonialism.

We spoke to some of the most exciting scholars and practitioners about mapping, space, power, coloniality and the African continent/diaspora. 

In this work, I am thinking with two stamps: one depicting the Intelsat V Satellite and another of the Earth Satellite Station built in Mazowe, Zimbabwe in 1985 and opened by former President Robert Mugabe. I explore how Satellite and Station figured in the imaginary of the newly independent nation – particularly through these stamps – contributing to a political economy of the imagery of Independence. This work reads the history of these stamps, their materiality, production and dissemination alongside the construction of an Earth Satellite Station and its attendant orbiting satellite, together with political events of the time. There are multiple strands of communication at play: in the visual imagery of the stamps, through the collectors artefact of the 'first day cover', the establishment of local facilities for satellite telecommunications in the country and finally, the way this was spoken about in the Zimbabwean press at the time. I find resonance in the theme of this work with the broader project in the way these means of communications serve to quite literally 'disembody' dialogue and speech (and the worlds they construct) allowing them to transmit across distance and time.

My contribution will be a series of vignettes and paper collages that reflect on the city of Kampala—an important site of contemporary urbanism and unmaking of colonial histories. The vignettes will be punctuated by these collages that disarticulate and reconstruct colonial spaces across the city. Using the railway line as a main site of investigation, the collages and vignettes explore the tension between contemporary place-making and colonial infrastructure. One of the main subjects of in the vignettes and collages is the Kampala Railway Station.Today, at the eastern end of downtown, the station remains an iconic vestige of colonial architecture. The building anchors the only formal set piece of planning in Kampala: the station’s front door forms an axis along Nakasero Hill with the parliament building. The station is a structure of brown sandstone, a two storey, horizontal volume. Since its construction in 1940, it remains almost unchanged in its present condition.In turn, the railway line appears to have abandoned its original purpose as a transport infrastructure. Whether functional or not, the line continues to make its mark and highlight the long history of division. The track has an unassuming presence in the city and everyday life has become integrated with the railway reserve. Street vendors, kiosk businesses, urban farmers and commuters gravitate towards the railway corridor: essentially now a slow-moving market space. Intersecting the central topography of the city, the track has become an interstitial zone. At the same time, downtown has in recent years developed around this large railway reserve, a crumbling urban obstacle to be navigated and built around.

Last years’ uprisings for black lives have sparked the globe in midst of a pandemic, strengthening an anti-racist mass movement and dismantling the carceral conjuncture of racial gendered capitalism. Movements and activists not only stood in solidarity with the black criminalized and working poor in the US, but further drew connections that attend to the local and global dimensions and entanglements of the punitive turn. Engaging with these connections and challenging methodological nationalism(s) with regard to struggles for black lives, this contribution discusses the practices of abolition geographies, and how these practices are in transnational conversation. Drawing on collaborative research with black-led collectives and initiatives in France, Germany and Switzerland, understood as relational locations not as bounded units, this project links abolition geographies in the Black Atlantic and the Black Mediterranean and therefore traces contemporary forms and spatial practices of black abolitionist internationalism.