ARCHITECTURE:African Mobilities
The exhibition “African Mobilities” addresses the complex forms of mobility within Africa and the diaspora. In the current situation, in which international borders are being redrawn, managed and monitored by force, and in which individual countries are increasingly subject to the affects of capitalist profit cycles, it is time to look into architectural forms which respond to these supposedly set structures.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: A.M. Architekturmuseum der TU München Archive
The exhibition “African Mobilities- This is Not a Refugee Camp Exhibition” seeks to explore how architecture responds to the complexity of African Mobilities – beyond the figure of the refugee. African Mobilities is not concerned exclusively with the architecture of the refugee camp. Instead, it seeks to explore how cities and towns might become sites of refuge for African populations on the move, while simultaneously reckoning with the ways in which colonial geographies of extraction are enfolded within seemingly new zones of resource extraction. In the exhibition African cities are presented as sites of refuge, which in their rapid transformation are producing new architectural typologies, changes in infrastructure and a rapidly expanding interaction with digital technologies. In this context, African migration is seen both as a challenge and as an opportunity for rethinking architecture and urban planning. In preparation for this exhibition, over the past two years architects, town planners, film-makers, artists, social scientists and authors from Africa met at 8 different locations: Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos, New York, Dakar, Praia and Munich. In workshops, they analysed this continually evolving world, and used diverse media to convey their research outcomes, and to visualize possible future urban scenarios. In the exhibition “African Mobilities” South African curator Mpho Matsipa from the University of the Witwatersrand brings together the works that came out of those meetings, including artworks, graphic novels, films and audiobooks. Ilze Wolff, a co-director at Wolff Architects in Cape Town, is creating the exhibition design, which captures the various forms of mobility among migrants in a spatial composition.
Info: Curator: Mpho Matsipa, Assistant Curator: Jennifer van den Bussche, A.M. Architekturmuseum der TU München, Pinakothek der Moderne, Barer Straße 40, Munich, Duration: 26/4-19/8/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.architekturmuseum.de
