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 question remains: Is that all that can be said? And there is another question: How can you represent what truly is Africa? For us at Saraba, we set out to have ...

The Amme Talks is a conversation between poet and machine. In 2003, poet Ulf Stolterfoht and a chatbot named Amme (which means “wet nurse” in German) met in Berlin. For one week, Stolterfoht interrogated Amme: not just a chatbot, actually, but a steel-and-glass construction with a computer interface, which is connected to a glass of milk, a robotic arm that tips over the glass, and a tube that releases water, as if urinating. Stolterfoht asked Amme—the creation of artist Peter Dittmer—about the nature of authorship and the agency of language; he intended to turn the answers into an essay on poetics. ...

Drawing on his book Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature, Ben Carver examines the figures and functions of evolution, isolation, and entanglement in the imaginary Utopias and Uchronias of speculative fiction, and plots some unsuspected paths between early counterfactual histories and the dark underworlds of contemporary conspiracy theory.

It‘s a shame and a sham to lose experiments. You could say that this is an experiment, black and white and lines, and a slight shade of blue. But on the larger, more intricate, scale, it is an experiment to see how much success we can make from failure, and how much introspection we can make from goodwill. This job—without pay—has taught us to believe in creation, and to look upon our creation with wonder, awe and intensity. That is, if this is still our creation. You discover that it has become the creation of a larger audience, even French ...

We think that to deal with art we ought to present it, not talk about it. For four months we opened our window to artists producing the finest work in Nigeria, Africa and elsewhere, and the result is what you will see. Seeing is ultimately a trafficking in subtlety, especially if that process of seeing is influenced by art. What, exactly, is art? Since at Saraba we’re open to this kind of questioning that is essentially a voyage, the kind that assembles literary content, art is a process as well as an outcome. Art is the reverberation of colour; art is ...

The year is 2250. The colony on the Moon is divided into debaucherous fascists and an underclass of mutants born without genitals. Follow Frank and Gerry, two mutant bros. By day, they’re forced to salvage through the remains of a porn-filled shuttle that crashed on the Moon’s dark side. By night, they plot their revenge.

Episode 21: Breaking the Waves (Disputaziuns Susch, The Magicians of the Mountains) The third episode in the series of chapters from Disputaziuns Susch, an annual conference scheme hosted by Art Stations Foundation CH and Grazyna Kulczyk, has Elisabeth Bronfen looking at Virginia Woolfe’s ‘Breaking the Waves’ and comparing Woolfe’s feeling of ‘walking a tightrope over nothingness’ to Heidegger’s notion of individual existences as ‘being thrown’ into the world. Also the horizon (see episode two) is returning to the debate. Disputaziuns Susch, from the beginning in 2017, has been a multi-disciplinary annual endeavor, bringing together scholars and artists, philosophers and authors, neuroscientists and ...

The way to begin is on a tiny road with no traffic, no nothing, perhaps only a flicker of light at the end of the road. This is the summary of Saraba for this second issue, and one is tempted to end it there. We received fewer entries than the first, and we could not get a Guest Editor. Our box was almost as empty as we left it. That is why there is a very high tendency for us to get despondent, end this all, easily, pocket our losses, and who can say anything? But Saraba deserves more than ...

In this anthology, edited by Fiktion’s cofounder Ingo Niermann, nineteen writers and researchers address a fiercely contested commodity in digital society: concentration. Ingeborg Harms, Quinn Latimer, Arthur Jacobs, and Raoul Schrott write about the circumstances under which a text or activity can completely draw us into its spell, Dirk Baecker and Amy Patton about a shifting concentration, Jenna Sutela and Elvia Wilk about one that carries us into the spherical, Charis Conn about concentration violently induced; Nina Bußmann writes about the uncertainty as to whether she is currently concentrating or distracting herself; Sophie Jung, Emily Segal, and Alexander Tarakhovsky make ...

Will you be able to tell love apart from crime or crime apart from love? Not a cheeky paradox, clearly an essential question in Pemi Aguda’s “Smother.” We are smothering each other. How might we respond? In the diaspora, Arthur Anyaduba argues in “Alimony,” the foreign African, finding a mismatch between cultural stereotypes and Western justice, takes to self-help. But he’s in a dream. Except that it’s not exactly a dream: Moses Kilolo’s “immortal precariat,” wanders into the belly of the night after a fight with his lover. He is shot. He is swallowed by infinity, ill-fated. Can we escape the “faceless puppeteers ...

Compiled by Philip Sanderson and mixed by DJ Huysmans, a mix made to accompany the Ballardian Breakfast Briefing virtual launch event for Applied Ballardianism.

Saraba Magazine announces the forthcoming publication of a special issue featuring the work of Tobias Zielony and Victor Ehikhamenor. Tobias Zielony is one of the artists included in the German Pavilion of 56th Venice Biennale of Arts 2015, curated by Florian Ebner. Ehikhamenor is a renowned Nigerian visual artist, writer and satirist. The special issue themed “Displacement” prefaces Saraba Magazine’s “Survival Issue.” A selection of ten photographs on migrants and migrant workers by Zielony is included, as well a short story and several drawings by Victor Ehikhamenor. Acclaimed Nigerian poet Jumoke Verissimo, author of the forthcoming Birth of Illusion, contributed three ...