https://disembodiedterritories.com Disembodied Territories Sat, 23 Apr 2022 19:36:07 +0000 https://disembodiedterritories.com en https://disembodiedterritories.com/Home Fri, 15 Apr 2022 18:57:03 +0000 Disembodied Territories https://disembodiedterritories.com/Home &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<img width="914" height="184" width_o="914" height_o="184" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/089bc8306d2e7b5e8131153476f12ef9fef2423973fe92b11614020a977f1d5c/Asset-7.png" data-mid="140640162" border="0" data-scale="9" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/914/i/089bc8306d2e7b5e8131153476f12ef9fef2423973fe92b11614020a977f1d5c/Asset-7.png" /> &nbsp; https://disembodiedterritories.com/Interviews Wed, 30 Mar 2022 11:50:18 +0000 Disembodied Territories https://disembodiedterritories.com/Interviews CONVERSATIONS AND REFLECTIONS︎︎︎ We spoke to some of the most exciting scholars and practitioners about mapping, space, power, coloniality and the African continent/diaspora. Disembodied Territories · Conversations and Reflections with Claudia Gastrow Claudia Gastrow is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg and an Iso Lomso Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies. Her work studies the intersection of politics, urbanism and the built environment in southern and Lusophone Africa, with a specific focus on questions of urban planning, architecture, and place-making. During her fellowship she will be a visiting scholar with the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative under the guidance of Professor Bruno Carvalho. ︎ cgastrow Conversations and Reflections with Dr Claudia Gastrow Disembodied Territories · Conversations and Reflections with Léopold Lambert Léopold Lambert is the editor-in-chief of The Funambulist. He is a trained architect, as well as the author of three books that examine the inherent violence of architecture on bodies, and its political instrumentalization at various scales and in various geographical contexts. He is the author of Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (punctum, 2016) and Politics of Bulldozer: The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Project (B2, 2016). His new book is called States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum (Premiers Matins de Novembre, 2021). ︎ leopold_lambert_ ︎ TheFunambulist_︎ Linktree Conversations and Reflections with Léopold Lambert Disembodied Territories · Conversations and Reflections with Marc Miller Marc Miller has degrees in Art History, Fine Arts, Architecture, and Landscape Architecture. His research focuses on representations of landscape in popular culture, synthesizing these lessons learned in culture, politics, making, craft, and scale. At the core of all of this research is the idea that landscape architectural ideation and imagery must shift to look towards problem-solving for the future instead of repeating design processes from the past to remain relevant. The goal is to teach students how to be critical of the past and responsive to their futures using speculative thinking and design fiction. To that end, Miller explores contemporary forms of media to communicate design problems to broad audiences. He focuses primarily on television and similar serial-based narratives. He is also interested in other mediums that enable worldbuilding to construct conversations and ideas about future landscapes. Conversations and Reflections with Marc Miller Disembodied Territories · Conversations and Reflections with Ozayr Saloojee Saloojee is an Associate Professor at Carleton’s Azrieli School of Architecture &amp; Urbanism in Ottawa. Beyond his personal research and teaching, Saloojee is creating new platforms for students to engage in critically important studio work surrounding equity, justice, contested territories, radical acts of joy Saloojee is also a co-director of the Carleton Urban Research Lab and cross-appointed faculty at the university’s Institute for African Studies. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, he has taught in Canada, Europe, and the US. He completed his B.Arch. and post-professional M.Arch. (Theory and Culture), at Carleton University and completed his doctoral work at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. ︎ osalojee ︎ o.saloojee Conversations and Reflections with Ozayr Saloojee Disembodied Territories · Conversations and Reflections with Sheryl-Ann Simpson My research and teaching are informed by an interest in the ways in which states and communities interact in place. So for example, how are government policies and programs implemented or translated into everyday experiences; how do community members use, narrate and shape their environments; and in turn how do those actions and stories influence new government policies and programs. I focus this general interest through questions around citizenship and immigration, and environmental justice and urban health.These interests also reflect my interdisciplinary training centred around social planning and community development with stops in political science, biology and geography. Conversations and Reflections with Sheryl-Ann Simpson Disembodied Territories · Conversations and Reflections with Suzi Hall Suzanne Hall is an interdisciplinary urban scholar and her work connects the asymmetries of global migration and urban marginalisation. From the grounded perspective of peripheral street economies, she explores the racialised frameworks of citizenship and economic inequality and their everyday contestations. By moving between globe, state and street, she engages with the margins as a capricious space in which social sorting, cultural intermixtures and claims to difference are forged. Her work pays attention to how wide geographies shape our knowledge of the urban condition, and is invested in the ethnographic possibilities of seeing political economies through the everyday. ︎ @SuzanneHall12 Conversations and Reflections with Suzi Hall https://disembodiedterritories.com/They-Who-Dream-of-Waves-A-Concise-Guide-to-Afro-Asia Sat, 23 Apr 2022 19:36:07 +0000 Disembodied Territories https://disembodiedterritories.com/They-Who-Dream-of-Waves-A-Concise-Guide-to-Afro-Asia THEY WHO DREAM OF WAVES: A CONCISE GUIDE TO AFRO-ASIA Alfonse Chiu ︎︎︎ <img width="300" height="300" width_o="300" height_o="300" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3d708cb58aa9ad41fb12acd05e61bf5cb3500a7f8119fdfcc5514ed975667b2f/Dis-Icons-17.png" data-mid="140473970" border="0" data-scale="12" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/300/i/3d708cb58aa9ad41fb12acd05e61bf5cb3500a7f8119fdfcc5514ed975667b2f/Dis-Icons-17.png" /> Coming soon Themes: Counter-Scopic Regimes, Spatial Claims Methods: Experimental, Ocean as Method, Bordering <img width="1732" height="1732" width_o="1732" height_o="1732" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/19e7235fded704b15ab35e3aed76418aebfd7a7ab89cd9af9c4639ede183c099/Alfonse-Chiu.png" data-mid="140473228" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/19e7235fded704b15ab35e3aed76418aebfd7a7ab89cd9af9c4639ede183c099/Alfonse-Chiu.png" /> Alfonse Chiu is a writer, artist, curator, and researcher working at the intersection of text, space, and the moving image. Their practice focuses on networked readings of the economies of geopolitical and socio-economic imaginaries as mediated by cartography and other modalities of spatial representation. They currently head SINdie, an editorial platform exploring Southeast Asian film culture(s), where they work on editorial direction, research, and special projects, and they are also the founder of the Centre for Urban Mythologies, a project-based research initiative interested in the (im)material tensions present within the urban contexts of the region. ︎ @alfonse.chiu︎ @alfonsechiu︎&nbsp;alfonsechiu.com https://disembodiedterritories.com/Subtle-Geographies Mon, 11 Oct 2021 13:08:28 +0000 Disembodied Territories https://disembodiedterritories.com/Subtle-Geographies SUBTLE GEOGRAPHIES Anna Sango ︎︎︎ <img width="2251" height="2251" width_o="2251" height_o="2251" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4ca513e8ce3992d3db1661aef77a362a846b693ac0337dbd6c3c9ad37ce43263/Dis-Icons-09.png" data-mid="140463287" border="0" data-scale="12" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4ca513e8ce3992d3db1661aef77a362a846b693ac0337dbd6c3c9ad37ce43263/Dis-Icons-09.png" /> In response to the Disembodied Territories project brief, I have chosen to explore the formation of black femme subjectivity amongst the violent capitalist, patriarchal and neo-colonial constructions of space in African cities. In this video submission I explore a black feminist reading of the cinematic and the geographic, centring subjectivity and the enactment of black femme refusal and resistance as disruptions to spatial narratives that cater to Western, hegemonic imaginations.<img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/16f474012a12fbfc849223c043d6d9ffd9ff0163f2e0d0e2822592aa7cb396f3/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140689071" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/16f474012a12fbfc849223c043d6d9ffd9ff0163f2e0d0e2822592aa7cb396f3/Dis-Icons-40.png" />i Inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumb’s “scenes of black feminist fugitivity” (2016), this video explores the relationship between historical trauma, the body and the city – relationships that are intimately inscribed in the geographies of Johannesburg, South Africa. In Subtle Geographies the filmic practice refuses chronological time and favours tense-less impermanence, perpetual restlessness and fragmentation as ways to construct a cinematic “otherwise”. This emerges through a collaged visual and sonic landscape<img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/16f474012a12fbfc849223c043d6d9ffd9ff0163f2e0d0e2822592aa7cb396f3/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140689071" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/16f474012a12fbfc849223c043d6d9ffd9ff0163f2e0d0e2822592aa7cb396f3/Dis-Icons-40.png" />ii, which reconfigures and disrupts the cinematic frame in order to move past a desire to be representable and legible. Here, I have used my personal archive of Johannesburg – including collages, photographs and video footage – as well as text clippings from the Chimurenga Chronic. The video piece includes audio from two short films: ‘Cycles’ (1970) by Zeinabu irene Davis and ‘Territories’ (1984) by Isaac Julien; music from Spaza’s ‘Sizwile’, The Wretched’s ‘What is History’ and Erykah Badu’s ‘Twinkle’; and interviews of Alice Coltrane (view here) and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (view here). I am also reading from Audre Lorde’s ‘A Litany for Survival’ and ‘A Song for Many Movements’. Themes: Premonitions of Bodies, Presencing the EroticMethods: Collage, Experimental References: Campt, T. (2017) Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press. Gumbs, A. (2016) Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity. Durham: Duke University Press. Lorde, A. (2019) The Black Unicorn. United Kingdom: Penguin Classics. Mckittrick, K. (2006) Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nyong’o, T. (2018) Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. New York: New York University Press. <img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/16f474012a12fbfc849223c043d6d9ffd9ff0163f2e0d0e2822592aa7cb396f3/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140689071" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/16f474012a12fbfc849223c043d6d9ffd9ff0163f2e0d0e2822592aa7cb396f3/Dis-Icons-40.png" /> [i] To read more about spatial narratives and hegemonic imaginations, see:&nbsp;UNCONFESSED ARCHITECTURES by Huda Tayob [ii] For another piece centring sonic landscapes, see:&nbsp;SENSING CAIRO by Azza Ezzat <img width="1732" height="1732" width_o="1732" height_o="1732" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/62ecbd090e8f8cba65a49f5de2b10dee061d83fcb01e258cfb24bd03245a40bd/Anna-Sango.png" data-mid="139545830" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/62ecbd090e8f8cba65a49f5de2b10dee061d83fcb01e258cfb24bd03245a40bd/Anna-Sango.png" /> Anna Sango is a photographer, spatial practitioner and film student based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her photographic work explores the complexities of the Johannesburg inner-city, capturing the liminal, still and in-flux nature of this environment. More broadly, her work explores every day, and personal, urban narratives of displacement, transnationalism and formations of subjectivity/being in relation to these processes. Black feminist and queer methodologies and practices are central to her research and creative practice. She is currently completing an MA in Film and Television, at the University of the Witwatersrand, with a research focus on black feminist geographies and experimental cinema.︎ @divisions_in_space https://disembodiedterritories.com/A-Geopoetics-of-Dust Thu, 24 Feb 2022 15:20:14 +0000 Disembodied Territories https://disembodiedterritories.com/A-Geopoetics-of-Dust A GEOPOETICS OF DUST Aya Nassar ︎︎︎ <img width="2251" height="2251" width_o="2251" height_o="2251" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/447e34de038282aad8886ee399126476bcbc08adaba8e9586e72a249fb40004f/Dis-Icons-12.png" data-mid="140474087" border="0" data-scale="12" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/447e34de038282aad8886ee399126476bcbc08adaba8e9586e72a249fb40004f/Dis-Icons-12.png" /> In the social sciences, we are trained to know through vision and through light. Seeing is the metaphor for theory (Brown 2002). Being grounded in firm, solid, worlds is one for reliability (Bachelard 2018; Nieuwenhuis and Nassar 2020). Dust, therefore, as matter and metaphor, is an inconvenience to these registers of vision and solidity. Dust hides and perhaps clouds vision. Dust is the marker of the destruction of stability. It is what remains after− the aftermath. Is it possible to tell stories from within the dust storm, through the leftovers of orders? Do we encounter something about ourselves in the dust we make, leave to accumulate, or wipe away? Dust quietly exposes and brings into presence space and its elements: air, earth and water. For some time, I have been pondering the elemental and material geography of the city as an archive that shakes some of the established wisdoms about our cities. Part of the reasons I want to do this is that the question of space is more pervasive, more attractive and, also, vaguer. As Neil Smith and Cindi Katz warn, we often risk missing the material space that grounds the central metaphors of our geographical knowledge (1993). What I try to work with is an approach to working with, and through, the materiality of urban space. Instead of treating the space of the city as fixed and inert, its materiality foregrounds the small —and at times insignificant— constitutive material elements of the city and helps us appreciate the multiplicity of its affective investments and attachments. To attune myself to dust, I think, is to attend to something that always captivated me: what we might call ‘the ordinary’ (Berlant 2011, Stewart 2007)− the ordinary of cityness.<img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cc7c85208697fa65a63cea0e771935aed721625f12eb457ef2a3c9c9e5dc66c7/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140689142" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cc7c85208697fa65a63cea0e771935aed721625f12eb457ef2a3c9c9e5dc66c7/Dis-Icons-40.png" />i The ordinary would spring up for me, when as an Egyptian PhD student, who has really only wanted to understand her own city, I was assumed and expected to work on something enigmatic like Tahrir square after the revolution, or when now I give a presentation or a job talk, I get the same two questions about the new capital and informal urban areas.&nbsp;This is not to say that Tahrir, informal urbanism, and new capitals are not important, but rather as an academic from the region you are already imbricated with certain regimes of visibility −you are an academic abstract you come tagged with already, all ready, key words. Dust is then of the margins. When your city crashes the headlines with a bang, dust it is the leftover of the churn, what stays in its wake. Dust hovers as Pessoa once wrote, at the edge of visibility, where the night ends (Marder 2016:19). In a profession where training relies on extractivism (as in methods), accumulation (as in REFabble outputs) and hoarding (of ideas, insights, material, data, knowledge), dust works against our professional training that pushes us towards the sensational and exceptionalised. It is a geopetic that works against transparency and towards opacity in the sense proposed by Edouard Glissant (1997) and Katherine McKittrick (2006, 2021). Dust also returns. Always. Usually not suddenly as a haunting ghost but quietly and cumulatively, like a falling snow. It is through dust as a material that is at once generative, destructive and a residue that I navigate some of the ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart 2007) that tug at my attention as a student of cities of the Middle East, and perhaps some of other cities as well. I try to focus on the question of ruination as a keyword to make sense of the affective and material relationship to cityness. 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 a critical positioning of the present within violent structures. In this sense, ruination is an ongoing process with multiple temporalities. This understanding, I find, divests from a fascination with ruins and questions the political complicity in processes of ruination instead (Stoler 2013, 9-11). Yael Navaro-Yashin uses 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). But I think dust smuggles through ‘the aftermath’ and ‘the ordinary’ too. I write this while many face the realisation that Cairo has been changing beyond recognition in the past decade, that is post- the 2011 revolution, and that it is changing in ways in which many of us cannot intervene or have a say in.<img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cc7c85208697fa65a63cea0e771935aed721625f12eb457ef2a3c9c9e5dc66c7/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140689142" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cc7c85208697fa65a63cea0e771935aed721625f12eb457ef2a3c9c9e5dc66c7/Dis-Icons-40.png" />ii The sense of loss looms, especially because this decade also saw an increasing use of city spaces as loci of memory and narratives that cannot find their ways to official stories about the revolution, or the past in general (Madbouly and Nassar 2021). If the city is an archive for how we script ourselves in it, then how can we read it? If we follow Anne Laura Stoler (2009) in reading the archive along its grain —quite literally— then reading Cairo, and its sister cities, necessitates following its dust as matter that connects the human and non-human make-up of the city with its spectral traces in archives. As Achille Mbembe (2002) reminds us, an archive in a postcolonial context constitutes a spectral promise even by its mere absence.&nbsp; This is of course already in question in many cities that are always entangled in remaking themselves.&nbsp; Recently, people have turned to their city to trace what the archive occludes, perhaps to uncover global connections of solidarities, or minor histories that escape the national historiography of resistance and revolution (see for example Mossallam 2017). Yet, under the aggressive reshaping of the city, this uptake also seems to be one way of disappearing to leave us with only a trace. Dust, as Michael Marder (2016) states, is a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalogue of traces, an inventory of threats, and a set of promises. ︎ Pulverisation Let us also note, in passing, the paradoxical idea that dust, the final result of all destruction, is easily posited as indestructible.- Gaston Bacherlard When I attune to dust, it is usually when I am in a position of witnessing a change in my city, in front of which I feel helpless. Demolitions, implosions and disintegrations might seem as quick, sudden and eventful affairs. While demolitions are not intentionally focused on in architecture, they don’t fail to capture a visual aesthetic. The demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public Housing complex in St Lewis, caught live on TV, and subsequent pictures of the clouds of dust it generated, still dominate the rhetoric of death of architectural modernism, what is typically called the Pruitt-Igeo myth (Cairns and Jacobs 2014: 207). But what textures the background of this enigma of destruction? What if we slow the footage of unmaking the forms of cities? What if we linger in the gaps between fragments and shards? Is there anything there? Not in the wreckage and debris but in the spacing of making dust? In staying with this question, I am turning to Baghdad rather than Cairo, specifically to Sinan Antoon’s Novel فهرس, which translates to index. The novel has been regarded as one that is primarily about exile and nation (see Elimelekh 2021).&nbsp; The protagonist Namir—an Iraqi living in the United States—returns to post-2003 Baghdad and while on Al-Mutannabi street meets a bookseller, Wadouod. Wadoud is writing the index, an attempt to document the 2003 war. He eventually gives a draft to Namir. We follow Namir as he returns to the US with the manuscript, and his futile desire to write everything about the Iraq war himself. Let’s follow this novel through its other protagonists; others who drive the novel but actively contribute to unmake and fragment its plot. These are the protagonists of Wadoud’s index. In a series of vignettes, the index is structured around the stories of non-human fragments of Baghdad, or perhaps even al-Mutannabi street itself. We read testimonies of a tree, a wall, a bird; all finding the licence to tell their own story. Towards the end of the novel, we get the speech of a child, a waste scavenger. It is in this vignette that we realise that all the fragments in the index narrate their story up to a single moment of a bomb explosion. The frozen moment of explosion can be read as the one in which the index dwells. The one that retrospectively gathers all these fragments that scatter across the novel, and that weaves the multiple temporalities that each fragment gathers and folds. In one of the vignettes, the index itself speaks: In the beginning there was the explosion. Isn’t this what the accepted theory says? Perhaps this explosion was the universe’s cry as it left the womb of nothingness to the agony of being…The universe is a wilderness of fragments released in the darkness…I am trying to collect the fragments of only a small explosion...a weaver stringing these shards into a necklace to hang. But where/where to put it? Around the neck of the void&nbsp; (Antoon 2016: 246,my translation).&nbsp; Index, rather than its English title The book of collateral damage, allows the reader to arrive slowly to the moment of explosion every time, over and over again, with every story and over the 283 pages. What is important here is the stories that fragments tell to texture the ruination of Baghdad, rather than investing in the catastrophe of destruction itself, even though the damage is precisely the fabric of storytelling. It is only in freezing the explosion, that the index, the novel, and therefore the story of Baghdad can be narrated, even—or precisely—in a moment of its undoing. To help me make sense of this, I have been fascinated by artwork that freezes moments of material dispersal, explosions, collapses, and demolitions. I had been captivated by Heide Fasnacht’s sculptural work, which catches the destruction in a liminal point when space in its familiar materiality and composition is both there and not there (Nieuwnhuis and Nassar 2020). Such work attempts to suspend materiality of space “in a specific moment of time, but it is far from settled or from being an aftermath” or that freezes fragmented matter in a moment of release (Stoppani 2015: 22-23). Perhaps, this work, like the novel, captures the enigma of dust-making. Cornelia Parker’s (b. 1956) work comes most readily to mind. Parker’s Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) 1999, adorns the cover of Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake (Sharpe 2016). Parke’s most recognisable installation is her 1991 Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. For this piece, Parker enlisted the help of the Army School of Ammunition, blew up a garden shed, and collected the found debris to let it hand from the ceiling. Using light, the fragments cast shadow on the walls surrounding them. Commenting on her ‘Cold Dark Matter-Still Explosion’, Parker says that she attends to “these ‘frozen moments’ where there’s been lots of action but this is a sort of a quiet corner of that. So it is not the explosion, but the contemplation of these things in the air. And because these things are in the air, they haven’t got the pathos they would have had on the ground [as a debris of an explosion]” (Tate, nd). Elements of this piece will be revisited in her Mass (Colder Dark Matter) and Anti-Mass. Both showing the remains of churches, one struck by lightenting and the second by an attack (Blythe 2020). The contemplation of these things in the air. This is a poetic hovering and suspension. One that attends to ambivalence, before seeing the dust and the debris settle somewhere to stick to a meaning of the aftermath. Where the making of dust and the unmaking of forms are both there and not there.&nbsp; ︎ Accumulation When I attune to dust, it is usually when I am in a position of witnessing a change in my city, in front of which I feel helpless. I arrived to this realisation only recently, when asked what it is about ruination that keeps drawing me as a mode of researching the city. If all cities are destroyed and rebuilt, why fixate on the contemporary wave of demolitions in Cairo? The question stopped me in tracks, as it was essentially a question of why it is that ‘my’ city at ‘my time’ matters, and it is only later that I realised that perhaps it is the burden of witnessing the unfolding of the present (see Lauren Berlant 2011). Even though dust is what happens during the unmaking of space, it is also what settles after. What kind of stories are told from within the geopoetics of settling an accumulation? Cities are self-devouring, built on their past selves, and rising on their own rubble. Architect Seth Denizen writes that “[t]he image of the city, in particular, as a thing that is made of geology or on geology, increasingly has to contend with the idea of the city as a thing that makes geology&nbsp; (Denizen 2013, np, emphasis in the original). Denizen asks what kinds of soil does the city create? What is the ground a cemetery makes with its mix of organic and non-organic material, and with their multiple durations of decomposition? What kind of soil do construction and demolition debris create, with its concrete, steel, brick…etc. (Denizen 2013)?&nbsp; As what is decomposed, demolished and unmade gets to make the soil and ground of the city, then “the soil and the city are mirror images of each other” (Denizen 2013, np). Shehab Ismail, a historian of Cairo’s underground sewage and sanitary systems, writes a resonant history of Cairo as one that is “made up of layers upon layers of rubble and trash, ….[one that is] sedimented in geology” (Ismail 2020, np.). It is the clutter and waste that builds up the infamous trash mounds of Cairo, which is, then, the site from which he rewrites the city’s history. Not only that, the trash mounds, he discovers, are classic sites for archaeological investigation. These mounds, therefore, not only become, but have always been, the material archive of the city (Ismail 2021). What do we throw in this kind of archive? Perhaps what we let go of to the waste mounds, is that we have given up on repairing. In April 2022, a Facebook page called Memorabilia Museum was launched as a personal blog run by Hossam Elwan. Elwan is a film producer who also collects second hand and discarded material, primarily letters and photographs from second-hand shops, and sellers of Robabikya. Robabikya is the Egyptianized term of the Italian Roba vecchia ‘old stuff’, old belongings or paraphernalia. Within ten days of its launch, it had more than 10,000 followers. Elwan had for some years before that used his personal Facebook page to showcase his second-hand finds, usually with some commentary and occasional invitations for those who might have clues about the long-lost love letter, or a dated or undated photograph, to fill in some gaps. Followers and fans range from those who are commenting on the style of letter writing to those who think up clues to locate who might these long-discarded names and faces belong to now. The fascination with Elwan’s posts is an affect that is more than nostalgia (Facebook groups and nostalgia have been written about extensively by Nermin El Sherif 2022). Elwan performs a role of Benjamin’s rag picker as a materialist and performative historian (Le Roy 2018). In so doing, Elwan for us viewers is a salvager of the leftovers, once material seen as clutter, sold by the kilograms to the Robabikya buyers and sellers, becoming a speculative museum. Speculation is key to thinking with fragments. The storytelling genre here is one we could term ‘speculative pasts’ where the past is as equally foreclosed as the future. &nbsp; ︎ Following the Fancy of Dust We know dust as something that hides, veils, covers, and settles. Accumulation of dust is a nuisance that masks things from our eyes. Its greyness soaks up shimmer and glitter.&nbsp; Dust obscures the neat and sharp line that separates self from world, house from universe, old from new.&nbsp; Dust blunts the edges and eats up lustre and allure. Dust also does the opposite. As dust particles hover in a ray of light, we become more attuned to that ray of light, and see it not as transparent as we would have assumed. In a chapter entitled The Metaphysics of Dust, Gaston Bachelard writes that fine, light dust stirring and shimmering in a ray of sunlight...is a spectacle we often contemplate in our reveries. It is capable of liberating our thoughts from the everyday laws that regulate active and utilitarian experience. Reflections born of this spectacle immediately have a speculative tone. The speck of dust, in particular, departs from the general law of gravity… it follows its fancy (Bachelar 2018: 22). Dust is mundane, yes, but remember the hours spent watching it hover in a ray of sunlight one afternoon, letting it tug at your attention to follow its fancy or remember the awe of being admits a dust storm. Dust holds the promise of intimacy, as we wipe dust off surfaces we become attuned to the shape of a surface or the other, it takes shape through our touch. Dust is part of intimate and everyday encounters. We produce dust. We shed as many as 70 million microorganisms per hour making our home dust as diverse as a jungle, as our leftovers attach to other life and non-life forms (BBC 2017). Dust knows us, contains our registers, falls from us and comes back to haunt us after we have swept it away. Dust holds the promise of return, matter is not destroyed, I shed my skin somewhere it attaches to a microfibre, a sand particle and a pollen and joins a dust storm that travels from Africa to feed the Amazon Plants. A state locks up an archive, but the documents of history scatter in story, fiction, myth, secondhand bookstores and traces of clutter in a dark corner you forgot. With the increasing fixation on fast and slow destruction of cities, we have moved to a forensic turn to making architecture testify. What is harnessed here as Seth Denizen argues is “the epistemological power to make matter speak” (Denizen 2013, np). The promise of dust, I think, is that it disinvests from the neat division between the spectacular and the boring, the violent and the not, the eventful and the everyday. I have tended to love Kathleen Stewart’s description of Berlant’s work “a labor of attending to pockets—not just pockets of possible trouble but pockets per se. A space opens up in the ordinary. There is a pause, a temporal suspension animated by the sense that something is coming into existence. Berlant teaches us that things hanging in the air are rhythms and refrains worth describing… Describing them requires a digressive detour and a slowing and de-dramatization” (Stewart 2012). Dust smuggles our academic selves, into modes of storytelling that, I think, are more attuned to the fact the solidity of territory is a mere fantasy. Themes: Presencing the Erotic, Interrogated Materialities Methods: Fragments, Experimental References: Antoon, S. (2016). Fihris. Manshurat al-Jamal. Bachelard, G. (2018). Atomistic intuitions: An essay on classification. SUNY Press. BBC (2017), What's hiding in my dust? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-42370015 Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. In Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press. Brown, W. (2002). At the edge. Political Theory,&nbsp;30(4), 556-576. Blyth, F. (2020) Cornelia Parker: material memories, exploded objects and sleeping Tilda Swinton, Hero. https://hero-magazine.com/article/172328/cornelia-parker Cairns, S. Jacobs, J.(2014). Buildings must die: A perverse view of architecture. MIT Press. Denizen, S. (2012). Three Holes. Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy, 29-46. Elimelekh, G. (2019). Sinan Antoon’s Fihris: an index of two minds seeking one nation. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Elsherif, N. (2021). The City of al-Zaman al-Gamîl:(A) political Nostalgia and the Imaginaries of an Ideal Nation. Égypte/Monde arabe, (23), 61-79. Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of relation. University of Michigan Press. Ismail, S. (2020) Panorama. AlMadaq https://www.almadaq.net/en/articles/panorama-en Ismail, S. (2021). The Historical Junkyards of Cairo. TRAFO: A blog for transregional research https://trafo.hypotheses.org/26297#_ftnref5 Smith, N., &amp; Katz, C. (1993). Towards a spatialized politics. Place and the Politics of Identity,&nbsp;66, 76-83. Le Roy, F. (2017). Ragpickers and Leftover Performances: Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of the historical leftover. Performance Research,&nbsp;22(8), 127-134. Navaro, Y. (2012). The make-believe space: affective geography in a postwar polity. Duke University Press. Nieuwenhuis, M., Nassar, A., &amp; Rawlings, M. K. (2020). Losing ground: A collection of HⓄ les. Emotion, Space and Society,&nbsp;36, 100677. Marder, M. (2016). Dust. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Madbouly, M., &amp; Nassar, A. (2021). Fragment (s) of Memor (ies): The Enduring Question of Space and Storytelling. Égypte/Monde arabe, (23), 13-26. Mbembe, A. (2002). The Power of the Archive and its Limits. In Refiguring the archive&nbsp;(pp. 19-27). Springer, Dordrecht. McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. U of Minnesota Press. McKittrick, K. (2021). Dear science and other stories. In Dear Science and Other Stories. Duke University Press. Mossallam, A. (2017, April). History workshops in Egypt: An experiment in history telling. In History Workshop Journal&nbsp;(Vol. 83, No. 1, pp. 241-251). Oxford University Press. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. In Ordinary affects. Duke University Press. Stewart, K. (2012). Pockets. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies,&nbsp;9(4), 365-368. Stoler, A. L. (Ed.). (2013). Imperial debris: On ruins and ruination. Duke University Press. Stoler, A. L. (2016). Duress: Imperial durabilities in our times. Duke University Press. Stoppani, T. (2007). Dust revolutions. Dust, informe, architecture (notes for a reading of Dust in Bataille). The journal of Architecture,&nbsp;12(4), 437-447. Tate (n.d.) Cold Dark Matter: an exploded view. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/parker-cold-dark-matter-an-exploded-view-t06949 <img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cc7c85208697fa65a63cea0e771935aed721625f12eb457ef2a3c9c9e5dc66c7/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140689142" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cc7c85208697fa65a63cea0e771935aed721625f12eb457ef2a3c9c9e5dc66c7/Dis-Icons-40.png" /> [i] For another piece on ordinary cityness, see:&nbsp;NIGHTWALKERS, INSURGENT NOCTURNAL ECOLOGIES by Chrystel Oloukoï [ii] For another piece on Cairo's changing landscape, see: SENSING CAIRO by Azza Ezzat&nbsp; <img width="1732" height="1732" width_o="1732" height_o="1732" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8a78d733f5f26d7a0b083fbf0352be2e56c0d85e911f6d1090718ccf15733452/Aya-Nasser.png" data-mid="140466413" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8a78d733f5f26d7a0b083fbf0352be2e56c0d85e911f6d1090718ccf15733452/Aya-Nasser.png" /> Aya Nassar is a researcher learning about Cairo. She is interested in storytelling, materiality, elemental geography and postcolonial cityness. She is an assistant professor of human geography in Durham University where she teaches political and urban geography as well as geographies of development.︎ @ayamnassar︎ @A_M_Nassar https://disembodiedterritories.com/Sensing-Cairo Thu, 24 Feb 2022 15:31:20 +0000 Disembodied Territories https://disembodiedterritories.com/Sensing-Cairo SENSING CAIRO Azza Ezzat ︎︎︎ <img width="2251" height="2251" width_o="2251" height_o="2251" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1ff0ca48410ac9222691ed9f7e0322d846b4b2502cf4074dd65bfb92280a74b7/Dis-Icons-04.png" data-mid="140463310" border="0" data-scale="12" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1ff0ca48410ac9222691ed9f7e0322d846b4b2502cf4074dd65bfb92280a74b7/Dis-Icons-04.png" /> Your browser does not support the audio element. Between the formal governmental city and the informal community’s reactions, I search for hidden cities that are built by impressions, memories and perceptions. Through the work, a new imagined map is emerged from gained impressions and derivations. My contribution pivots mainly around understanding space and creating possible methods of engaging with and configuring that space, in an attempt to experiment and expand the ways through which my experience of the city as a citizen overlaps and informs my artistic interest and concerns. Themes: Premonitions of Bodies, Counter-Scopic Regimes Methods: Experimental, Counter-Cartography, Documenting the Mundane <img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140684622" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" /> [i] For another piece on sensing Cairo, see: A GEOPOETICS OF DUST by Aya Nassar [ii] For another piece on meditation on an urban city-scape, see: ARCHITECTURE AS AN INTERSECTION: MOBILITY IN DOWNTOWN KAMPALA by Thomas Aquilina &nbsp; Nasr City Bridges 50x50cm pen and ink on paper <img width="2480" height="2509" width_o="2480" height_o="2509" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7a61f223252b9d1a33a3c78c469c9fadf4cf3e625448ae84dfa50772e7eaf497/001.jpg" data-mid="139548426" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7a61f223252b9d1a33a3c78c469c9fadf4cf3e625448ae84dfa50772e7eaf497/001.jpg" /> During the COVID curfew, we witnessed the current rabid and destructive reconstruction taking place all over Cairo, centred mainly around building and expanding a massive network of highways and causeways all over the city. Many people started complaining that Cairo will be reduced to nothing else than one endless highway and a gigantic bridge. <img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140684622" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" />i Above the bridge study Nasr City Bridges 42x29cm pen on paper <img width="3409" height="2475" width_o="3409" height_o="2475" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1023ecd3467d9c7e916da4780a689c68074e2e5dc3937aa30c5e291b6b320c06/002.jpg" data-mid="139548427" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1023ecd3467d9c7e916da4780a689c68074e2e5dc3937aa30c5e291b6b320c06/002.jpg" /> Under the bridge study Nasr City Bridges 42x29cm pen on paper <img width="3457" height="2476" width_o="3457" height_o="2476" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1b5ea417728e1188162b97a649f1ea6c1361fee9222baec00723806b69be277a/003.jpg" data-mid="139548429" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1b5ea417728e1188162b97a649f1ea6c1361fee9222baec00723806b69be277a/003.jpg" /> It is noticeable that the new planning aims to facilitate the flow of vehicles over the bridge and put traffic under the bridge, pedestrians, vehicles and bicycles, as a second priority. <img width="3446" height="2474" width_o="3446" height_o="2474" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/795d377aaa8384466e0f1d8a02ed3c7508b0a4a84594eb1b4074225424ace32e/004.jpg" data-mid="139548430" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/795d377aaa8384466e0f1d8a02ed3c7508b0a4a84594eb1b4074225424ace32e/004.jpg" /> Lighting Flicker StudyNasr City Roads42x29cmpen on paper Stemming from my desire to try and navigate the urban reality, I have begun to retrace the roads I used to walk and cycle on. Then try to notice the noncore elements that have changed. One of these elements was the luminous flux of renewed streets’ lightings. They have changed the light from yellow to white, which makes an unusual flicker on pedestrians’ eyes. <img width="3510" height="1594" width_o="3510" height_o="1594" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/20e1b55d03d290d4092e24b7bcf0fd02b3cee5797c1ff04fac2eb0e1e5e1e9b4/005.jpg" data-mid="139548431" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/20e1b55d03d290d4092e24b7bcf0fd02b3cee5797c1ff04fac2eb0e1e5e1e9b4/005.jpg" /> Shadowless roads Nasr City roads 55x25cm pen and ink on paper The second element was trees’ disappearance. almost all of the trees have been cut. No more shade on the roads. Cairo turned to be grayer than before, asphalt roads and buildings.<img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140684622" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" /> ii <img width="1732" height="1732" width_o="1732" height_o="1732" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f2c7ca9ff23cebd46b450c845b0c009b60b79211aa9fde1ba4368acaa12942b8/Azza-Ezzat.png" data-mid="139547929" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f2c7ca9ff23cebd46b450c845b0c009b60b79211aa9fde1ba4368acaa12942b8/Azza-Ezzat.png" /> Azza Ezzat is a Cairo based visual artist. She is interested in urban observations and detecting human traces in the built environment. Between the formal city, monopolized by government planning, and the informal reactions of different communities of inhabitants, Ezzat searches for hidden cities that are built by impressions, memories and perceptions. Through the work of retracing those different visions, a new map of the city, emerges from the multiplicity of layers not seen before. ︎ @azza.ezzat.artist https://disembodiedterritories.com/Onks-Such-Emotion Fri, 11 Feb 2022 10:15:45 +0000 Disembodied Territories https://disembodiedterritories.com/Onks-Such-Emotion ONKS: SUCH EMOTION Bothan Ahmed Botan ︎︎︎ <img width="4501" height="4501" width_o="4501" height_o="4501" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/230e1ddcc32ae5d4d25cd3817080461ee6e8108dee944978f8d149a32fc9247d/Dis-Icons-24.png" data-mid="140466576" border="0" data-scale="12" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/230e1ddcc32ae5d4d25cd3817080461ee6e8108dee944978f8d149a32fc9247d/Dis-Icons-24.png" /> ‘What happens when we proceed as if we know this, antiblackness, to be the ground on which we stand, the ground from which we to attempt to speak, for instance, an “I” or a “we” who know, an “I” or a “we” who care?’1 <img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140688336" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" />i ‘The autobiographical example...is not a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them.’2 ‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.’3 Me 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 When I stopped talking stopped smiling stopped laughing you didn’t understand why didn’t want to understand why When you brought my parents to talk it wasn’t them you blamed, it was me When you sent me to a therapist it wasn’t them you blamed, it was me When you didn’t know what to do with me it wasn’t them you blamed, it was me When I stopped eating stopped learning stopped coming you didn’t want to understand why Why? Because I was different The door opens during class. I do not turn my head. I never do, because if I do not see the mockery on the faces of the others, it does not feel as bad, even as they kick my chair and mock me in gleeful whispers. A womanly voice says my name. Now, I must turn my head. She is not a teacher. I must come with her, she says. I look up at the teacher in front of the class, one of many who have failed me so many times throughout the years. The teacher nods briefly, then continues talking. There is relief in his eyes. I get up, my head down, and walk to the hallway. The woman introduces herself. I nod and stay silent. It is a trick I have learned through the years. The less you say, the less they can say about you. When you look different, everything you do is different. It does not matter if you actually act different. The choice is no longer yours. It has been predetermined. It does not matter that I do not have an accent, that I speak their tongue fluently. I look different, so I talk different, walk different, breathe different. Eventually, if it goes on long enough, you start thinking that maybe you really are acting different. And when you are at home, you practice your walking, look in the mirror to see how your lips move when you talk, smell your breath and touch your hair and your skin just to find something, anything that can fix all this. <img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140688336" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" />ii The woman walks me to a small office and sits behind a desk. She begins to talk, and I finally understand that she is a therapist. A therapist for children. And then it begins. Every week, we meet. She asks me questions, gives me compliments, makes me solve riddles. Every day is different, but they all start the same: I am pulled from class and led to the office for a one-hour talk. And now, there really is something different about me, and different is bad. So the mockeries intensify. The woman is trying to figure out something, and they are trying to figure out something because she represents the school. My school. I am too young to understand what it is they want. I do not know what is wrong with me, what I did or what I did not do. When I became older, I understood. They wanted to know why I do not talk to their sons, their daughters, their grandsons, their granddaughters. The fault cannot lie with them. They are our children. They are like us, look like us, talk like us, have names like ours. We raised them well. The fault must lie with you. You who are different and have a different name, different hair, different skin. Different is bad. You must not make our children feel bad. They do not understand. Could not understand. Did not want to understand. If they understood, forced themselves to understand, it would have ruined them. It would have been an admission of guilt. They would be guilty – the children they created, their fathers, their mothers, their grandfathers, their grandmothers, the society they all wrought together. Six months later, they bring my mother in for a talk. Including the therapist, the dean and the principal, five people in one tiny office. Their excitement is palpable. The riddle has been solved, the mystery revealed. Triumphantly, they tell my mother I am on the spectrum. Asperger’s. They show us the papers, the files, the folders. My mother does not understand. She does not speak the language well. She thinks they have decided I am insane, that I will be sent to an institution. It catches them off guard. They did not know. So I have to explain to her what I do not understand myself, what they have decided I am. I have to read what they have written about me, how they have dissected and studied me: ‘Responds normally to compliments’, ‘Withdrawn, enquire about home situation’, ‘Grades failing, cognitive inhibition?’ I am not a child but a subject, a difficult question to be approached from different angles to figure it out. And they have figured it out, so they say. Their minds are at ease, their consciences at rest. They have not borne the iniquities of their forefathers. It can all be put to rest now. Now, they can ignore the name calling as it happens right under their noses, the kicks, the insults dressed up as jokes, the mocking giggles and laughter. It is no longer their responsibility, no longer their fault. They have solved the problem. He is not normal, as our children are. He is different. Themes: Wounds of Ruptures, Spatial Claims Methods: Intimate, Experimental References: [1] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 7. [2] Sharpe, In the Wake, 8. [3] W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Strivings of the Negro People (1897)’, in The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays, ed. Nahum Dimitri Chandler (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 68. <img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140688336" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" /> [i] For another piece on space, knowing and anti-Blackness, see: ARCHITECTURES OF THE (UN)INHABITABLE by Ola Hassanain &amp; Egbert Alejandro Martina [ii] Another text telling a story of a Black self is: AN ODE TO INCOHERENCE: ANNOTATIONS, UNDERCURRENTS by Nasra Abdullahi <img width="1732" height="1732" width_o="1732" height_o="1732" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2e08fda66c42f6b6936e2618cee678cd8cd05de81d0f34ecd0c56a652ed6e3cf/Bothan.png" data-mid="140455937" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2e08fda66c42f6b6936e2618cee678cd8cd05de81d0f34ecd0c56a652ed6e3cf/Bothan.png" /> Bothan Ahmed Botan is a twenty-nine years old writer who moved to the Netherlands at the age of two when his family fled the war in Somalia. His family was placed in the little town of Someren, which is virtually entirely white. He lost his father to cancer when he was in the fourth grade and was raised – along with three siblings – by his mother. Bothan studied Literature at Leiden University and currently works as a translator. He is currently working on a novel about his mother’s life.︎ Bothan Botan https://disembodiedterritories.com/Disembodying-the-Black-Brit Mon, 11 Oct 2021 13:28:39 +0000 Disembodied Territories https://disembodiedterritories.com/Disembodying-the-Black-Brit DISEMBODYING THE BLACK BRIT Christiana Ajai-Thomas ︎︎︎ <img width="2251" height="2251" width_o="2251" height_o="2251" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a61bebdd4196577a2ed248977f58688f9e39f61f37870490effbe23bf544baaf/Dis-Icons-06.png" data-mid="139560608" border="0" data-scale="10" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a61bebdd4196577a2ed248977f58688f9e39f61f37870490effbe23bf544baaf/Dis-Icons-06.png" /> The Black Brit embodies the exploitative relation between Global North and South, Britain and Africa. The power dynamics that form race and nationhood draw Africans to Britain whilst preventing true belonging here. The Black Brit then is formed of truths imposed upon bodies.<img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ccf5f732686f142ccf18c0a0cb21130a26e3aa3088a55fc17a0547fc45a9ec6e/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140689113" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ccf5f732686f142ccf18c0a0cb21130a26e3aa3088a55fc17a0547fc45a9ec6e/Dis-Icons-40.png" />i Where museums have acted as spaces for formation of truth, this visual serves to put the truthmaking process into the hands of those who it has historically harmed. A compilation of photos taken by Black Brits documenting the mundane accompanied by audio of three Black Brits of African descent. The museum itself is removed from physical location as the Black Brit presents themself in difference and shared experiences. In so doing, Western truths of racial homogeneity and inferiority are displaced. Both museum and Black Brit are disembodied.<img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ccf5f732686f142ccf18c0a0cb21130a26e3aa3088a55fc17a0547fc45a9ec6e/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140689113" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ccf5f732686f142ccf18c0a0cb21130a26e3aa3088a55fc17a0547fc45a9ec6e/Dis-Icons-40.png" />ii Themes: Premonitions of Bodies, Presencing the Erotic Methods: Digital Ethnography, Intimate, Film, Documenting the Mundane <img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ccf5f732686f142ccf18c0a0cb21130a26e3aa3088a55fc17a0547fc45a9ec6e/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140689113" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ccf5f732686f142ccf18c0a0cb21130a26e3aa3088a55fc17a0547fc45a9ec6e/Dis-Icons-40.png" /> [i] Another recitation of Black British stories can be found in: ODE TO INCOHERENCE by Nasra Abdullahi [ii] For another piece on migration, diaspora and memory, see:&nbsp;AFROREQUIEM by k. eltinaé <img width="1732" height="1732" width_o="1732" height_o="1732" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a78d9fdb1a6fdd891bd07fe820e460c1b75f4b44aa5bfa0f5c81c79f5047d8ac/Christiana-Ajai-Thomas.png" data-mid="139560465" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a78d9fdb1a6fdd891bd07fe820e460c1b75f4b44aa5bfa0f5c81c79f5047d8ac/Christiana-Ajai-Thomas.png" /> My name is Christiana Ajai-Thomas but most people refer to me as Roni. I am a Black Brit currently an MSc student in Sociology at the LSE. I am most interested in postcolonial, Black Marxist and queer theories, and my recent dissertation looks at how LGBT+ Nigerians experience and respond to policing in Nigeria. ︎ @xt1ana︎ @unenlightenmentproject ︎&nbsp;The Unenlightenment Project&nbsp; https://disembodiedterritories.com/Black-Horizon-Practices-of-Worlding-on-the-Edge-of-Lagos-Lagoon-in Mon, 11 Oct 2021 13:37:16 +0000 Disembodied Territories https://disembodiedterritories.com/Black-Horizon-Practices-of-Worlding-on-the-Edge-of-Lagos-Lagoon-in BLACK HORIZON: PRACTICES OF WORLDING ON THE EDGE OF LAGOS LAGOON IN THE COMMUNITY OF OWORONSHOKI Dele Adeyemo ︎︎︎ <img width="4501" height="4501" width_o="4501" height_o="4501" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b77f239fa1db51c7dc1a23436fc0e95eb3d228c7355ce094cf346084dd55c853/Dis-Icons-27.png" data-mid="140464648" border="0" data-scale="12" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b77f239fa1db51c7dc1a23436fc0e95eb3d228c7355ce094cf346084dd55c853/Dis-Icons-27.png" /> Journal from Oworonshoki planning the screening of Black Horizon at Slum Party 09/11/19:We’re here at the junction of Lone Street and Teledalase Street where the festival will take place in a few days. Hermes falling from the sky with Crocs on his heels, lands a backflip. He’s messing around entertaining everyone before showing me around. We’re in his neighbourhood with Valu and the guys looking at different spots to decide where to screen our film Black Horizon. Valu the chief organiser of the festival, through his organisation Ennovated is coordinating the guys and the Oworo dance community ahead of the event they’ve very intentionally named, Slum Party. They know how the rest of Lagos views people from the slums and they don’t care. They know the weight of the term and they revel in it. This is a festival for their community on their own terms. A few of us perch on the edge of a small kiosk pieced together from a discarded shipping container. With our backs pressed against the metal standing in a slither of shade from the overhanging roof sheltering us from the beating sun. We pose together for some Instagram selfies. Drinking spirits straight from the sachet, it’s 11am and the mood is starting to flow. Hermes is telling me that these guys might do the baddest shit at times but they’re good really. “That’s why we’re doing Slum Party”, he continues, “to give everybody something positive to focus their energy on!” Self knowingly slipping in and out of multiple languages and dialects for fun: Yoruba, Pidgin, African-American slang, he’s bringing a vibe to raise the mood of everyone. “We want to make evvvverybodyyyy happy!” he says, which the rest of the guys repeat enthusiastically. He explains that young people in this part of Lagos have plenty of other influences demanding their attention. In lower Oworonshoki like many other informal precarious settlements of the city, in the space never fully occupied by the state, a mixture of informal and unofficial forms of social organisation appear. Their intention with Slum Party is to provide an alternative experience to the narrative regularly sensationalised in the local tabloids. Through the intergenerational festival of Slum Party, they demonstrate to the rest of the city that the community is made up of much more than the real and imagined tales of violent area boys, ritualistic killings, and forms of religious extortion that are often interwoven with organised crime and police corruption. According to the Oba (King) of Oworonshoki, this site now surrounded by the sprawling megacity of Lagos began as an independent trading village hidden in the forest near the riverbank when it was settled by his great grandfather, His Royal Majesty Salami Ajumogijo who migrated from Ile-Ife – the spiritual home of the Yoruba – in the early 20th Century. Perhaps then, Oworonshoki is not an informal settlement at all, but a planned village outpost of an inland regime that was swallowed up by the modernist legacy of the colonial city. The biannual Slum Party, taking place at the change of the seasons acts therefore like a traditional village festival in a hyper urban context renewing the collective spirit and community identity. I have a sip of something from a plastic cup that’s going round, perhaps a mixture of sachets like Super Cola and Orijin. My empty stomach rumbles as the spirit hits, causing a bubble of hot fumes to rise back up to my mouth right at the moment the guys tell me - it gives you power! The 50ml sachet of alcohol, a product designed for the airline industry to more compactly package and distribute drinks on board flights, is now a staple of the West African market for fast-moving consumer goods aimed at the very poorest. It’s strange how its efficiency of packaging, distribution and disposability translate seamlessly into this space. The guys say that half the city’s Okada riders, taxiing the bravest of commuters or most time pressed through Lagos’ dense slow-moving traffic, fuel their bodies in this way. I arrived here by Okada. No Uber or Bolt driver could bring me this far into Oworonshoki’s poorest quarters. They can’t risk damaging a car that they’re renting at very steep rates. Very few vehicles can even manage the undulating unsurfaced road. The old battered yellow taxis with springy suspensions perhaps could but hardly any of them exist anymore since the introduction of the transport apps. It’s even a struggle on the bike, slowly bobbing and weaving over the mounds of earth and skirting round large muddy ponds in the road. With my feet planted flat on top of the exhaust pipes either side of the bike, I relax, trusting entirely in the biker’s skill. As he conveys us effortlessly across this offroad like terrain he maintains a self-confident calm fostered by the everyday experience of navigating the frenetic city with efficiency of movement. Here at the end of Third Mainland Bridge, we’re on the frayed edges of Lagos’ infrastructure. <img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140686639" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" />i In addition to the fact that all Lagosians have to supply their own water by drilling boreholes on their property and use generators as a back to the temperamental light, here there is almost no infrastructures at all. The roads go unsurfaced and the storm drains that double as the city’s sewer system are left cut shallow and exposed to the street. The only visible state produced infrastructure are the concrete posts bearing the signs of the street names, a remnant of a cynical attempt to better regulate and tax the informal settlements of the poor. Still, this site is better known as Power Base, affectionately named after a local kid who could always be found there hustling and joking. This is where the main stage for Slum Party will be. Right outside the local chief Alakoso’s house. We choose a wall on the street perpendicular to Power Base junction on which to screen the film. Valu will arrange for his guys to paint it white, Hermes is already planning the next rehearsal for their live performance... Scene #1: WATERY EDGES On the precarious watery edge of the lagoon of a megacity in West Africa, fringing the modernist urban plan in a community dispossessed by generations of colonial and neocolonial extractions, a young man performs a ritual wearing his late father’s suit. Encompassing movement, spiritual practice and popular culture, he orients himself in an environment devastated by a regime of spatial production that began centuries ago. Though surrounded by a landscape ruined by economic collapse, his dance is nonetheless a practice of worlding amongst the ruins of an ever-ongoing catastrophe, rearticulating within his community social relations that reimagine geography, space and time.&nbsp; <img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140686639" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" />ii Dancing in the footsteps of his ancestors, his form moves in reverence to those that left from this place and never returned, and those forever held in this structural geography of dispossession. His limbs elegantly communicate unspoken memories of the city, a laconic flow stringing together bodily inheritance with life experience – his movements archiving the long decline of a sprawling modernist African metropolis, built with the hubris of the rising petro-dollar, on top of the failing infrastructures of slavery and colonialism. Scene #2: ROOFTOPS On the island at the centre of the megacity on a rooftop in the former Business District, the young man rehearses with friends. With the backdrop of an aging skyline erected during the heydays of the young nation, they experiment in their creative partnership through improvisation. Violin, traffic, movement, dance all merge into one performance. He moves closer to the player to hear the delicate vibrations of the strings through the hum of engines and patter of horns distant and close by that reverberate across concrete flyovers and tower blocks. They and city are entranced in an invented ritual. Later miles away, on another rooftop next to his best friend’s house he catches up with the rest of the guys. They share out Uncle’s birthday cake smoking and drinking Guinness from the bottle. When the moment’s right and without planning they turn to dancing, improvising moves instep like a polished dance crew.... Scene #3: SLUM PARTY Outside the local chief’s house in what was once a village before it was swallowed up by the informal urban sprawl of the growing megacity, he finally has the opportunity to perform live for his community. Thronging the stage on all sides the neighbourhood gather in anticipation. The young man and the dance group he has choreographed begin to move their individual bodies as one rhythmic mass. It’s well after dark and their bodies are lit by streetlamps wired to run on private diesel generators. The community look on, gripped. Themes: Premonitions of Bodies, Presencing the Erotic Methods: Film, Performance References: [1] Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 3. [2] Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 6. <img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140686639" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0a529f991bba66727a725a00322a9358cc417e829123b6c4aaf00d708f7caaa5/Dis-Icons-40.png" /> [i] For another piece that looks at infrastructures on the edge of the city, see:&nbsp;ARCHITECTURE AS AN INTERSECTION: MOBILITY IN DOWNTOWN KAMPALA by&nbsp;Thomas Aquilina [ii] For another bodily exploration of identity, read and watch:&nbsp;WATER NO GET ENEMY: COUNTER-CARTOGRAPHIES OF DIASPORA by&nbsp;Remi Kuforiji <img width="1732" height="1732" width_o="1732" height_o="1732" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6737bfd4bc1b8b443c6db8406cfd34b6ecfd3626fb826fc56021fc256a4624a1/Dele-Adenyemo.png" data-mid="139634024" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6737bfd4bc1b8b443c6db8406cfd34b6ecfd3626fb826fc56021fc256a4624a1/Dele-Adenyemo.png" /> Dele Adeyemo is an architect, creative director and critical urban theorist. His creative and research practices interrogate the underlying drivers of architectural development and urbanisation, locating them in racialising logistical processes that orchestrate planetary patterns of life. Most recently Dele has presented at the 2nd Edition of the Lagos Biennial with Black Horizon (2019), and the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial with The Cosmogony of (Racial) Capitalism (2020). Dele is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, and teaches an Architecture Design Studio with Ibiye Camp and Dámaso Randulfe at the Royal College of Art in London. ︎ @dele_adeyemo︎ @dele_adeyemo︎ Linktree https://disembodiedterritories.com/Nightwalkers-Insurgent-Nocturnal-Ecologies Mon, 25 Oct 2021 08:20:51 +0000 Disembodied Territories https://disembodiedterritories.com/Nightwalkers-Insurgent-Nocturnal-Ecologies NIGHTWALKERS, INSURGENT NOCTURNAL ECOLOGIES Chrystel Oloukoï ︎︎︎ <img width="4501" height="4501" width_o="4501" height_o="4501" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/54775c9b5fa8177fa79c352b79869a12b96b82f2a623d3b44ccc395c1301136c/Dis-Icons-26.png" data-mid="140463565" border="0" data-scale="12" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/54775c9b5fa8177fa79c352b79869a12b96b82f2a623d3b44ccc395c1301136c/Dis-Icons-26.png" /> "Night Litany B" is part of a broader series of experimental shorts, entitled "black nocturnal" — a fragmentary and continuously expanding archive of engagements with nighttime in Lagos primarily, but also Boston and Johannesburg. Taking the night as metaphor and methodology, black nocturnal explores epistemologies of the dark entangled with logics of surveillance and criminalization in the afterlives of slavery and colonialism in Lagos.<img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/54552a7f7c310e83ea303cc61711bdc12526472f1afd50b41626d8b7035955c1/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140688975" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/54552a7f7c310e83ea303cc61711bdc12526472f1afd50b41626d8b7035955c1/Dis-Icons-40.png" />i An “anti-ethnography” of sorts, black nocturnal mobilizes an aesthetic of fragments, obliqueness and underexposure to refuse the violence of visualization, and asks what ways of seeing, knowing, and being might emerge from serious engagements with dark matters.<img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/54552a7f7c310e83ea303cc61711bdc12526472f1afd50b41626d8b7035955c1/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140688975" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/54552a7f7c310e83ea303cc61711bdc12526472f1afd50b41626d8b7035955c1/Dis-Icons-40.png" />ii Black Nocturnal Series “Night Litany (A)”, 2021, 20’, digital“Night Litany (B)”, 2021, 9’, digital“Exposure”, 2022, 12’, 16mm film, digital, surveillance footage“Frenzies”, in post production, 16mm film“Ire a Santiago”, in production, digital Openings “On the night in question I was coming from my brother’s house when I met the police. I was suddenly caught and a light was flashed on me. I was so afraid that I pointed to the nearest house &amp; said that is my house. We went to Abudu’s door: it was about 20 minutes to 9pm. The key found with me was the key of my own door. I was arrested. I had only a covering cloth on that night.” — Lawani, Ikorodu District Officer Criminal Record Book (1915-18). “The King having been crowned, he is henceforth forbidden to appear in public streets by day, except on very special and extraordinary occasions; he is, however, allowed evening strolls on moonlight nights when he may walk about incognito. ” — Johnson, The History of the Yorubas (1921) THEY CAME THAT NIGHT For Léopold-Sedar Senghor They came that night when the tom tom rolled from rhythm to rhythm the frenzy of eyes the frenzy of hands the frenzy of statues’ feet SINCE how many of ME ME ME are dead since they came that night when the tom tom spun from rhythm to rhythm frenzy of eyes frenzy of hands frenzy of the feet of statues — Leon Gontran Damas, Pigments (1978) “You could just be walking with your friends, taking in the cool air, and suddenly they’ll shout “illegal walking”. Without questioning! They'll not question you, there is no petition against you. They will not even search you, they will just say “enter moto!”, their language is “enter moto!” It's like a kidnap style, there are no rules of engagement and police procedure, just “enter moto!” You have to defend yourself or run away. When we got older we got tired of running away, we stopped running away and be like arrest me na wetin I do you?” — Proficience, November 2020 Themes: Premonitions of Bodies, Counter-Scopic Regimes Methods: Fragments, Experimental, Film <img width="1987" height="1974" width_o="1987" height_o="1974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/54552a7f7c310e83ea303cc61711bdc12526472f1afd50b41626d8b7035955c1/Dis-Icons-40.png" data-mid="140688975" border="0" data-scale="2" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/54552a7f7c310e83ea303cc61711bdc12526472f1afd50b41626d8b7035955c1/Dis-Icons-40.png" /> [i] Dark cities are unpacked in RUNNING IN THE SHADOWS: FUGITIVE MOVEMENTS ACROSS AND BEYOND THE DARK CITY by Jaquelin Kataneksza [ii] For another piece on fragments as method, see:&nbsp;A GEOPOETICS OF DUST by Aya Nassar <img width="1732" height="1732" width_o="1732" height_o="1732" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/13e9428bdd21b72ebcff91581ffdcd194e224aa6d6311b17a44d6fd7a544d343/Chrystel-Oloukoi.png" data-mid="139562438" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/13e9428bdd21b72ebcff91581ffdcd194e224aa6d6311b17a44d6fd7a544d343/Chrystel-Oloukoi.png" /> Chrystel Oloukoï is a writer, researcher and curator, broadly interested in time, temporality, policing and the afterlives of slavery and colonialism in Black continental and diasporic contexts. She is pursuing a PhD in African and African American Studies and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University. She is currently researching and producing a mixed media project on imaginations of the night in Lagos, as well as the afterlives of colonial technologies of temporal discipline. ︎ @chrystel.nyx︎ @_Onikoyi︎ www.chrysteloloukoi.com