The multi-layered research and exhibition project Women on Aeroplanes seeks to change the parameters of how we see and listen to the achievements and practices of women in a multitude of moments, being part of a transatlantic and transnational history, with a focus on the struggles for independence and their after effects. The transition from mobilizing all possible forces to win a battle and its hangover, the disenchantment of not being part of any negotiation concerning the future, seems to crystalise a history lesson about power politics. The disappearance of women in politics after their strong visibility during the times ...

Lagos: Search, Research Research always makes life complicated. We might end up knowing too much, getting lost in accumulated information, stories, details, in between perspectives that all fall apart. How do we begin such a process and how do we navigate it, how do we move within? How do we set the premises? What do we do next? What to do with a discovery we don’t want to make? Which form, format should it take? All these questions will stay with us and transform through issue 2 of the Women on Aeroplanes Inflight Magazine. And yes, as many an- swers turn ...

My life is a collage, with time cutting and ar- ranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting, sometimes with the fresh shock of a surrealist painting, wrote Eileen Agar, photographer and painter, associated with the Surrealist movement who, like Colette Omogbai, attended the Slade School of Fine Art—almost exactly 40 years earlier, be- tween 1925 and 1926. The repetition of a certain phrasing in connection with Colette Omogbai, a pioneering Nigerian painter, “who identified as a Surrealist,” sent us looking into histories of surrealisms. The plural here is important, be- cause there are indeed many invocations and ...

The idea of making use of spaces, transforming existing ones, creating new ones, making a living and a change, very much carries through the following pages. The importance to have, maintain, and organise places, frameworks, and opportunities that allow a continuity to negotiate and fight over common grounds. Making spaces vibratory. To imagine a restaurant or a nightclub in Manchester or London in the 1930s as a business proposition but at the same time as a safe space in which to conspire to liberate Africa; to imagine a restaurant as an art gallery—while working as a waitress—and proceeding to turn ...

The figure of the woman on aeroplanes summons the idea of the itinerary of stopovers—in London, Bombay, Calcutta, Accra, Colombo, Paris, Port-au-Prince and Washington DC—that not only speaks of the insufficiency of historiography but requires thinking through the relations between the international, the intra-national and the transnational. Women on Aeroplanes confronts us with the intermittent transmission of interrupted networks that sustain the negotiation between inter, intra- and trans-nationalisms. To turn towards magazines and publications is to think through the implications of world form entailed by periodicals that seek to thematize the work of collectivisation. We turn to magazines so as ...

It was a weirdly long process …. Everything about it. The compiling of this issue #6, but also sorting out what precisely it was about. It has already been two years since we arrived in Cape Town and Johannes- burg with some broad questions around and about notions of law: how did the Constitution lay the legal foundation for and shape the transition process to- wards the “new South Africa”? And how would its initial promise be assessed from today’s perspective, especially with regard to women’s rights? What happened? What went wrong, and how? What’s gone right? These were questions ...