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Lagos in 2115

3 Experimental Animations - Digital Slideshow - 360 VR Experience - Graphic Novella

This project imagines the city of Lagos in 2115, and explores the interactions between bodies and spaces both virtual and physical across three fictional narratives or “moments”. 

The first moment, “Offline”, speculates around the sustainability of a completely digital world (the virtual space) in the face of an illegal subversive culture known as “going offline”. The second moment, “Òmìnírá” explores property rights and local African mobilities through the illegal fishing adventure of two scavengers. While the previous two moments consider communal spaces, the third moment “Dreamscape” focuses on the individual experience of both virtual and physical space and how, through concepts such as “assisted dreaming” both forms of spaces may interact to facilitate profound, neurological human experiences of places. 

Ultimately, across these speculative futures, there are common themes of class, poverty and inequality driven by disparities in digital assets. Being online is the status quo, whereas being the opposite, offline, is illegal; these dynamics provide an outlet for imagining potential structures of order, surveillance, resistance and governance, amid the political economies of African virtual and physical spaces.

https://jeyifo.us/African

Olalekan Jeyifous received a BArch from Cornell University and is a Brooklyn-based artist.

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Uses of the Normal: the Normal as Power

V. Mitch McEwen refers to Audre Lorde—specifically her essay, “Uses of the erotic : the erotic as power." McEwen identifies a range of issues that her practice engages “speculating while Black,” including a critical engagement with the normal, focus on the event, bodies, material and robotics. She cites Fred Moten’s essay “The Touring Machine: Flesh thought inside out” from “Plastic Materialities” (2015)

V. Mitch McEwen talk @ SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTURE (SCI-ARC) on 16 Oct 2019

View here

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Sounds of Oppression

BY ROY WALLACE AND DANIEL JOHNSON

The history of the reggae sound system inheritance passed down through generations in various music styles (Ska, Rocksteady, Reggae, Dancehall and various sub-genres where it has fused with other cultures). The words and phrases describe the same fight concerning social exclusion within the Black diaspora.

This case study seeks to re-present the unique relationship between Jamaican reggae and its impact on British reggae from ‘Sleng Teng’ to Grime music.

See: Two video essays on Reggae Innovation and Sound System Culture 

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If I went to the corner shop to get a bottle of Coke, I’d be handed a large glass bottle that I knew to bring back...

“We believe it’s possible to achieve our goals and also be an example to other countries in Africa and the world.”

By  Samira Larouci on Dazed & Confused [05.2019]

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Social & political issues manifesting in the surroundings

“My aim in expressing myself is to depict Tunisian society, and draw critical portraits of it, each time through one of the material extensions of society, which are most often everyday objects. This is how I think I make ‘engaged art’,” Aïcha says.

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A Manifesto by Lee Scratch Perry

Here are 10 life rules from a man who lives in a truly extraordinary way.

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Black Craftspeople Digital Archive

From 1619 to beyond, Black craftspeople, both free and enslaved, worked to produce the valued architecture, handcrafts, and decorative arts of the American South. The Black Craftspeople Digital Archive seeks to enhance what we know about Black craftspeople by telling both a spatial story and a historically informed story that highlights the lives of Black craftspeople and the objects they produced. 

https://blackcraftspeople.org/

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Afro-Sonic Mapping

In this dialogue, artist and musician Satch Hoyt and curator Paul Goodwin discuss Hoyt’s ‘Afro-Sonic Mapping’, a sonic and visual research project tracing the migration of rhythms and sounds across the African diaspora.

Sounds between Luanda, Lisbon and Salvador da Bahia mapping how these sounds are inscribed in contemporary rhythms across the Atlantic and beyond.

https://thecontemporaryjournal.org/strands/sonic-continuum/afro-sonic-mappings

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Coloniality of Infrastructure

“To ensure European dominance in this rapidly changing world, they claimed, Europe and Africa had to become “integrated.” This actual project of “integration” became known as Eurafrica, and aimed to entrench European colonial power in Africa.

...

Despite the end of formal colonial rule, Eurafrican infrastructures continue to shape the present. And even as Africa enters a new age of global financial investment and development today, this infrastructure attests to the specific colonial power relations that built them.”

Infrastructure shapes territories and governs the movements and processes within and across them. But infrastructure excludes, contains, and subjugates, as much as it includes, moves, or liberates (...) Attending to the coloniality of infrastructure allows us to decenter the prevailing governing rationality based on calculation and foreground other practices of world-making.

Coloniality of Infrastructure is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, Critical Urbanisms at the University of Basel, and the African Centre for Cities of the University of Cape Town.

Read further here:

https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/coloniality-infrastructure/412386/editorial/

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Build Alternatively, Build Affordably

Plastic Waste > Bricks by Kenyan Entrepreneur

Nzambi Matee — a Nairobi-based 29-year-old entrepreneur and inventor — is the founder of a startup that recycles plastic waste into bricks that are stronger than concrete called Gjenge Makers Ltd, her company initiated following the development of a prototype machine that turns discarded plastic into paving stones. One day at the factory means 1,500 churned plastic pavers, prized not just for the quality, but for how affordable they are.

https://gjenge.co.ke/

YouTube vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbZKP4UAtL8&t=7s

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[C]oded Bias

We now live in a world where AI governs access to information, opportunity and freedom. 

The Algorithmic Justice League is an organization that combines art and research to illuminate the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence.

“We risk losing the gains made with the civil rights movement and other movements for equality under the false assumption of machine neutrality.“

https://www.ajl.org/

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‘For better or for worse & in the interest of the progress of civilisation’

Nigeria to Mali: 15 speeches of independence that made history

In 1960, African leaders – the likes of Lumumba, Houphouët, Keïta, Senghor, Mba and Ahidjo – stepped up to the podium one after another to proclaim the independence of their nations. Whether solemn or radical, these speeches went down in history.

https://www.theafricareport.com/41331/nigeria-to-mali-15-speeches-of-independence-that-made-history/

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Stories of Migration & Architecture

Archive of stories of diasporan African and Caribbean communities and migration in and around Great Britain.

Free online films on the British Film Institute [BFI] website:

https://player.bfi.org.uk/search/free?subject=Afro-Caribbean+community+in+Great+Britain

Watch: Home Away from Home, Director: Maureen Blackwood, 1993

Sankofa Film Collective's Maureen Blackwood renders the often unspoken experience of loneliness and sacrifice within migration stories. To ease her homesickness Miriam recreates an aspect of home in her suburban British garden. Cultural memory exerts a healing power, combatting cultural appropriation, hostility towards migrants and the rift between Miriam and her Nigerian-British children.

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-home-away-from-home-1993-online

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Cotton Queens

For AW19, Lagos-based designer Bubu Ogisi of IAMISIGO gives praise to the east African legend of Queen Nyabingi, and her earthly priestess Muhumusa, who is famed for using both her spiritual and military might to fight colonialism and establish women’s rights. 

This narrative is then woven into a different tale, that of the troubled history of cotton production, trade and consumption on the continent which to this day does not rightfully give back to those who grow it. 

https://nataal.com/cotton-is-queen

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Architect Documenting Every Slave House Still Standing

Despite the painful histories behind slave houses, Hill says that visiting them is not a painful experience for her. “The slave-owners didn’t want these buildings to survive, and the fact that they do is credit to the enslaved people,” she says.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/jobie-hill-saving-slave-houses?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=598d06f879-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_12_14&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f36db9c480-598d06f879-71150701&mc_cid=598d06f879&mc_eid=38e64cecce

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The Fight to Save One of Dakar’s Most Distinctive Markets

For nearly a century, the distinctive, geometric architecture of Marché Sandaga, or Sandaga Market, stood out from its surroundings on the southern tip of the sprawling coastal capital. 

“Sandaga goes way beyond the building. Everyone knows that the Sandaga Market is a heritage,” he says from his shop, where he sells sunglasses and purses just across the street from the original building.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/historic-sandaga-market-dakar-senegal

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There are other worlds out there they never told you about

Pan African Space Station- PASS

https://panafricanspacestation.org.za/

Founded by Chimurenga in collaboration with musician and composer Neo Muyanga in 2008, the Pan African Space Station (PASS) is a periodic, pop-up live radio studio; a performance and exhibition space; a research platform and living archive, as well as an ongoing, internet based radio station.