South to South: A Meeting on African and Afro-Diasporic Technologies
Centre d'Art Waza
Democratic Republic of
Congo
July 1–5, 2024
— Francis B. Nyamnjoh
The South-to-South: A Meeting on African and Afro-diasporic Technologies gathers a group of artists, thinkers, and community organizers with the aim of sharing different branches of technology, art, and local cosmologies. The second in-person meeting in the Democratic Republic of Congo (July 1–5, 2024) will be dedicated to probing how
traditional land-based knowledge and ancestral practices bare cosmological understandings of technology. For this, participants will focus on re-orienting local technological systems towards the materialization of the Pluriverse.
The Pluriverse is a world of many worlds in which diverse futures can be sown, multispecies realities can be nurtured, and a plurality of knowledges can achieve connectivity. Technologies for the Pluriverse, moreover, suggest forms of epistemological solidarity by addressing our planetary condition.
In thinking of pedagogical forms geared towards forms of being and existing otherwise, we invoke Achille Mbembe’s call for a Pluriversity, where the thinkers, artists, and social organizers coming from different places of the Global South propose alternative forms of knowledge exchange and dissemination through walks, experimental workshops, cooking sessions, and experimental lectures. The program will count on international and local participants such as Russel Hlongwane from Lo-Def Film Factory, Bodil Furu,
Mr. Makonga, Diane Cescutti, Walla Capelobo, Vanessa Orewa, Rita Mukebo, Sarah Ndele, Christian Nyampeta, Patrick Mudekerza, Elsa M’bala (AMET), Joseph K. Kasau Wa Mambwe, Julia Taonga Kaseka, and Désiré Lumuna all of whom will be directing different avenues of research around questions such as: How can technologies operate to helpus delineate and cohabitate the multiple human and more-than-human worlds that surround us? How can we garner attention to the technicity of local practices and material histories that counter the prominence of western ideology of echnological instrumentality, progress, and automatization?
Through the participant’s artistic and theoretical contributions, we hope to develop localized epistemes and methodologies for alternative knowledge production. In fact, to counter the belief that the ontological basis of reality in Africa is based, as Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila once stated, on the “enclosure and transformation of stone into private property, which prompts the formation of new social relations, an ecological regime organized around the commodity frontiers of mineral and metal extraction,”2
Our gathering will look into the multiple ways in which millenarian ways of working with materials, technologies, and modes of representation can instead address the heterogeneous and folding reality of African technicity.
1. Francis B. Nyamnjoh,.Decolonising the Academy: A Case for Convial Scholarship
(Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2020), 13.
2. Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Tram 83 (Dallas, T.X.: Deep Vellum Publishing, 2015), 7.