Arts, Culture and Urbanism

[Translate to English:] teaser art/articulations

In this key area, we addresses the many ways Africans express themselves through the arts in a broad sense – fine and performing arts as painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theatre, literature as well as the arts of the everyday such as ritual, popular culture, fashion, dance, film and all sorts of religious and profane performances that women and men may engage in. Arts, Culture and Urbanism thus covers all forms of expression and articulation; how humans relate to each other, how they produce sociality, how they make meaning of their own life, how they use media in their social lives, how they build their homes and towns and how they live their cities.

News

18 Oct 2021 / Research

Publication: Coloniality of Infrastructure

15 Sep 2021 / Research

Publication: The Weight Women Carry. Research on the Visible and Invisible Baggage in Suitcase Trade between China and Africa

10 Sep 2021 / Research

Publication: (Un)Sighted Archives of Migration—Spaces of Encounter and Resistance

Events

No entries available.

Projects

Research project

PRECURBICA - Precarious Urbanisms in Coastal Africa

The project investigates the impact of climate risk on social and infrastructural processes in African coastal cities. Rather than seeing urban ‘precariousness’ as an endemic condition that mires African societies in a position of dependency, the project takes it as an invitation to uncover strategies of living and making the city in the face of looming crisis.

Research project

Life in the West African Savannah since the 1970s: Hegemony and autonomy

This project explores the social and political transformations of Côte d'Ivoire, adopting a long-term perspective.

[Translate to English:] Making the City Teaser

Research project

Making the City: Agency, Urbanity and Urbanisation in Ordinary Cities

Looking at Goma (DRC), Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), Johannesburg (South Africa) and Yaoundé (Cameroon), we ask how urbanites make their cities as social, cultural and architectural spaces?

[Translate to English:] teaser_territorial_design

Research project

Territorial Design: How Infrastructure Shaped Territory in Africa

Scholarly emphasis on the informal, unplanned character of African urbanization has obscured the historical role of physical infrastructure. This project focuses on large-scale infrastructure as a matter of design, with far-reaching consequences for urban and rural territories.

[Translate to English:] teaser aesthetics from the margins

Research project

Aesthetics from the Margins. Photography in Africa and the Poetics of Un/Making the World

This project embarks on an historical inquiry into the place of photography in cultural ways of world-making in Africa.

Research project

Art/articulations: Art and the formation of Social Space in African Cities

This project aims at understanding aesthetic practice and processes of artistic articulations as part of the creation and transformation of social spaces in urban Africa.