For this new episode of our podcast, our two guests are Johannesburg-based artist Zara Julius and regular contributor to The Funambulist Zoé Samudzi. We discuss the contents and forms of A Funeral For…, a book by Zara in collaboration with Zoé about land, indigeneity, death, and sound in southern Africa (in particular South Africa and Namibia) and, beyond, in the spaces of global Blackness.
A Funeral For… is a hand-bound art book created ...
It was the year 1954 when the “Department of Tropical Architecture“ was founded at the Architectural Association (AA) London, by Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew and their colleague James Cubbitt. Tropical architecture had been a topic before the study programs foundation, large conferences like the “Conference on tropical architecture” March 1953 at University College, London or two years before in Venezuela had established the issue internationally. The AA Tropical Architecture study ...
A unique blend of travelogue, photographs and poetry, A Stranger’s Pose draws the reader into a world of encounters haunted by the absence of home, estrangement from a lover and family tragedies. The author’s recollections and reflections of fragments of his journeys to African cities, from Dakar to Douala, Bamako to Benin, and Khartoum to Casablanca, offer a compelling and very personal meditation on the meaning of home and the ...
There is a statement, “Africa is a country,” used to satirize Western‘ preconceptions about Africa. With billions of people, thousands of ethnicities, several colonial histories and varied post-independence struggles, the continent is spoken of as a single plane that is beset by bad leadership, unending poverty, and the odd scenery. Yes, the continent has these, and yes, there really are some similarities across the different countries and cultures. But, the ...
Pick up any academic or popular publication that deals with urban life in Africa and be prepared to be overrun by caricature, hyperbole, stereotypes and moralistic hogwash. Urban Africans are either bravely en route to empowering themselves to attain sustainable livelihoods or the debased perpetrators of the most unimaginable acts of misanthropy. Explanations for these one-dimensional distortions vary from historical path dependency perspectives, to the vagaries of the peddlers of ...
This conversation was recorded at e-flux before a screening of Ahmed El Maanouni’s Al Hal [Trances], curated by Omar Berrada. The evening was co-presented with ArteEast.
Al Hal [Trances] (1981, 88 minutes) is a classic of Moroccan cinema and a compelling introduction to it. While presenting itself as a music documentary on the iconic band Nass El Ghiwane, it is also a film about friendship and collaboration, archival memory, the anti-colonial imagination, and working-class life in ...
A conversation preceding the African Film Institute’s inaugural screening at e-flux curated by Natacha Nsabimana, featuring two works by Rwandan filmmaker Amelia Umuhire. The African Film Institute is convened by Christian Nyampeta and hosted by e-flux Screening Room.
This episode was recorded live at e-flux on September 19, 2024. The event, hosted by the African Film Institute, featured a screening of Lumumba (2000, 115 minutes) by Haitian director Raoul Peck, followed by a conversation between Feza Kayungu Ramazani of Centre D’art Waza and anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana.
A conversation between filmmaker Sosena Solomon, designer and urban scholar/theorist Mpho Matsipa, and anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana.
This episode was recorded at e-flux Screening Room before a screening of Merkato, curated by Natacha Nsabimana. Sosena Solomon’s Merkato is a documentary tracing the lives of four people as they navigate the demands of life and work in one of the biggest markets in Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Filmed on location in Merkato, before a radical architectural transformation, ...
African Media in an Age of Extraction takes a fresh, site-specific look at the relationship between moving images and the mining of natural resources, arguing that where we “place” Nollywood and other industries has important practical and conceptual consequences. Such locations are not just spatial metaphors but also tangible geographies with material connections to extractive economies. Sites of film production are often spaces of oil prospecting, timber harvesting, and mineral ...
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