Conferences

Venice Biennale and the IUAV August 2023

Venice 2023…

A visit to Venice to attend the inaugural AFRAHUAN session at the Teatro Piccolo at the Arsenale as part of the Carnivale Proceedings of the Venice Biennale proved an apt occasion to visit and view Venice in full exhibition and tourist mode.

Venice is indeed a city like no other. No cars, no bicycles, lots of passageways, canals, and tourists. One adjusts to this city of walkers, traders and tourists all jostling for space in alleyways that are literally not wide enough to swing a cat. The green canal water both enticing and goading the unwary walker to come to its banks.

A walk to the Arsenale gave a better viewpoint of the wide vista of Venice as a series of islands with canals as fingers out to the grand canal. The adaptive reuse of various parts of this still living city is clear. The Arsenale itself remains the home of the Italian navy and a museum dedicated to the armed force still exists with the occasional boat dropping by.

The main part of the old Arsenale building however now has been occupied by the architecture biennale, this year curated by Lesley Lokko and involving your writer and a wide set of architects, writers and artistes with Africa focused research. The ‘carnivale’ exhibition is no mean feat, a work of immense dedication, creativity and focus. The curation is superb and content more than can be taken in at one go. One easily gets immersed in what it offers up with names one knows and has heard of contributing to this rich tapestry of art. Fortunately the accompanying catalogue means one can refer back to installations and events missed or glossed over in the viewing of the exhibition.

AFRAUHN AT THE CARNIVALE…

The African Architectural and Urban History Network (AFRAUHN) had its debut at a session at the Carnivale at the Biennale. Curator Lesley Lokko introduced our session which had two parts, the first involved speakers Ikem Okoye (Delaware, USA), Kuukuwa Manful (Michigan University, USA) and Neal Shasore (London School of Architecture), with Ola Uduku (Liverpool University) chairing, where the session focused on a discussion on the remit of AFRAUHN which is to help encourage and advocate for Architectural Research in Africa, and support new generations of indigenous historians and researchers in Architectural History and urbanism. After Ikem Okoye’s introduction both Kuukuwa and Neal were able to discuss their different approaches to, and hopes for Africa-related Architectural Research.

AFRAUHN Session [Courtesy of Venice Biennale]

The second session chaired by Huda Tayob (Unversity of Manchester) involved all speakers from the earlier session and also Murray Fraser (University College London). This session was a roundtable where the speakers responded to Huda Tayob’s questions which considered specific issues and challenges to scholarship in African Architectural History and its situatedness within the wider context of global research and challenging normative notions of historical research and scholarship.

AFRAUHN 2nd Session [Courtesy of Venice Bienale]

The entire session was recorded and will be published by the Venice Architecture Biennale before the end of September 2023. Due to the events related to air traffic control problems in the UK unfortunately several of the invited AFRAUHN team were unable to attend the session, and others arrived late due to flight delays. It is hoped we will be able to include their recorded contributions to the final video output from the session.

IUAV (University of Venice)

On Wednesday, the day after the Carnivale discussion we were fortunate to reconvene at a meeting room at the IUAV (University of Venice), thanks to Dr Jacopo Galli, who has researched into African modernism and was involved in the curation of the exhibition Africa Big Change, in Milan and has worked with Manchester School of Architecture on the analysis of schools in West Africa. IUAV has sites across Venice, and we met at the C’a Tron campus, a Venetian villa owned by the wealthy Tron Family before being gifted to the State. Post meeting tours took us to the Carlo Scarpa-influenced main campus of the IUAV, a repurposed convent which still has parts which are owned by the church. The campus also has a significant architectural library including book volumes and periodicals accessible and in regular use by its students.

Unlike the exclusive arrival to the watery city a few days earlier, the trip back to the airport was by airport water taxi, which proved to be a bus trip stopping at many of the archipelago of islands which constitute Venice, including Murano, famous for its glass works and San Michael. Approaching Marco Polo Airport Venice by water seemed a very apt way to leave the city.

Symposium: architecture and urban planning in post-independence Morocco

By michele tenzon

July 14, 2023

Africa, Conferences, MENA, North Africa

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Call for participation
Journée d’étude sur l’architecture et l’urbanisme au Maroc après l’indépendance (1956-1986)
20^th February 2024, Centre Jacques Berque, Rabat
Deadline (french or english): 30^th September 2023

The newly established Réseau de recherche sur l’histoire de l’architecture au Maroc – RHAM (rham.hypotheses.org) launches a call for participation to the Symposium: ‘L’architecture et l’urbanisme au Maroc après l’indépendance (1956-1986). Trajectoires d’acteurs et circulations de savoirs’.

“Cette journée d’étude se concentre sur une période spécifique de l’histoire du Maroc : les trois décennies qui ont suivi l’indépendance du Maroc, de 1956 à 1986. Cette période, qui demeure encore largement sous-explorée au regard de la littérature produite sur la période coloniale, suscite désormais un intérêt croissant. Fort de ce constat, la première journée d’étude du RHAM vise à faire se croiser et se rencontrer ces différentes manières d’aborder l’histoire de l’architecture, du paysage, de l’urbanisme et de l’aménagement du territoire au lendemain de l’indépendance, en mettant en évidence des matériaux de recherche inédits“

For more info, see the call for participation here.

Seminar on 13th July 2022 – Liquid Crystal Concrete: Postwar Colonialism

By jacksoniain

May 13, 2022

British Colonial Architecture, Conferences, Ghana, United Africa Company

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Recent years have seen an upsurge of academic, curatorial and critical interest in postwar art in Britain and around the world. This has included addressing the question of how we define what “postwar” is and how expansively we might think about the period and its cultural significance. This series of Paul Mellon Centre research seminars will showcase new perspectives on the arts of postwar Britain as an interdisciplinary and transcultural terrain of research. Talks in the series engage with the issues of empire and worldmaking, with questions of migration, the environment and with the intersections of art, technology and new media.

The sixth and last in a series of summer research seminars on The Arts of Postwar Britain 1945–1965 with Iain Jackson and Rixt Woudstra. 13th July 2022, 6pm-7.30pm, Paul Mellon Centre

25 May to 13 July 2022
A series of summer research seminars to be held on Wednesdays from May to July 2022
Paul Mellon Centre [online and in person]

Iain Jackson – Modern Architecture in West Africa: Schools, Sculptures and Magazines

This paper is concerned with modernist architecture in “British West Africa” produced in the aftermath of World War Two and the independence period of these countries.

These experimental and often provocative structures were designed for climatic comfort, as well as becoming didactic vehicles for ideas sharing ideas of a modern and liberated Africa.

The paper will discuss attempts at forming a “Bauhaus” Art School in Accra, followed by various commissions of libraries, community centres and museums that attempted to blend the most radical architectural designs with decoration, murals and sculptures. The West African context seemingly presented a “blank canvas” for newly qualified architects eager to “experiment” in ways that would be impossible in Britain. Whilst these buildings were often presented as symbols of an emerging nationalism and expectation of liberation, they also reveal the ongoing neo-colonial methods, with many relying on the patronage of multinationals such as the United Africa Company.

Finally, the paper will discuss how these projects were reported and shared, especially through the high-brow magazine Nigeria, which regularly featured extensive articles written by the architects on the latest designs.

The result was a diverse and extremely fertile context that reveals an often-overlooked set of important structures responding to a period of political flux and cultural exchange.

Rixt Woudstra – “A feeling of warmth”: Tropical Timber, Modern Interiors and the United Africa Company in Postwar Britain

In 1960, the new, modernist headquarters of the United Africa Company (UAC), one of the leading British trading businesses extracting palm oil, cocoa and other raw goods from West Africa since the late nineteenth century, opened near Blackfriars Bridge in central London. While the structure’s grey concrete and glass exterior appeared cold, inside the architects used a strikingly large variety of gleaming tropical timbers. The doors, floors and panelling, as well as most of the furniture, were made of honey-coloured idigbo, pinkish makore, fine-textured guarea, reddish-brown sapele and deep-brown African mahogany – all logged by one of the company’s subsidiaries, the African Timber and Plywood Company, in Nigeria and Ghana. Although an exceptional example, it was certainly not the only building containing exotic timbers in postwar Britain; tropical wood could be seen in and on the outside of university building, civic centres, housing estates, sport facilities and offices.

Scholars have explored how Jamaican and Honduran mahogany, sourced by enslaved workers, left an imprint on British domestic interiors and furniture design in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Less well known, however, is that “empire timber” – and later, “world woods” – continued to permeate British design and interior architecture well into the twentieth century. This talk focuses on the commercial activities of the UAC in Nigeria and Ghana during the 1950s and ’60s and considers how tropical timber was deployed to soften or provide a decorative element to modernism, often perceived as cold and austere. Moreover, examining tropical timber and tracing where and by whom it was logged, how it was processed, sawn, shipped and sold, enables us to see how British postwar modernism was dependent on imperial and neo-imperial networks of extraction and colonial labour.

The full programme details are here: https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/whats-on/forthcoming/liquid-crystal-concrete/event-group and you may book tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/liquid-crystal-concrete-postwar-colonialism-tickets-333553967897

Archival Urge: Collecting Histories of Architecture from Africa, May 26 2022

By jacksoniain

April 22, 2022

Africa, Conferences, Ghana, Historiography, Nigeria

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‘Archival Urge’ is the second part of the symposium ‘Document Fever’ organised by the Architectural Association in collaboration with the Architecture Space & Society Centre, Birkbeck School of Arts on 25 February 2022. This time in partnership with KNUST, this panel aims to celebrate three projects that ‘collect’ histories of architecture in very different ways. We will think, amongst other questions, about the archival impulse/fever that made these projects coincide in time and space; the archival need to collect histories that are missing in architectural history; and the diverse formats of archive-making that these projects have taken or are taking.

1. Aalii to Zygomorphic (2020) by Rexford Assasie Oppong (KNUST)
2. Accra Architecture Archive (ongoing) led by Kuukuwa Manful (SOAS)
3. Sub-Saharan Africa: Architectural Guide (2021) Edited by Philipp Meuser and Adil Dalbai, with Livingstone Mukasa.

Adil Dalbai
Adil graduated from Humboldt University of Berlin with a master’s degree in modern history and cultural theory, specializing in the architectural history of Eurasia and (post)colonial contexts. He worked as an editor and author for DOM publishers, focusing on architecture and urbanism. He went on to study architecture at the Technical University of Berlin and worked at Meuser Architekten on architecture projects in Western Africa. He researches and writes about architecture in Central Asia and Africa and its global interconnections. Additionally, he is a guest critic and lecturer, as well as (co)editor and author of several articles and books on architecture, including Theorising Architecture in Sub-Saharan Africa (DOM publishers, 2021). Since 2014, he has been managing editorial director of Architectural Guide Sub-Saharan Africa (DOM publishers, 2021, with Philipp Meuser and Livingstone Mukasa), a seven–volume documentation of the architecture of all 49 African countries south of the Sahara.

Kuukuwa Manful
Kuukuwa is a Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her research examines the sociopolitics of West African nation-building and citizenship through a study of the architecture of educational institutions. She has a Master of Architecture and a BSc Architecture degree from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), and an MSc in African Studies from The University of Oxford. Her previous research has explored the positioning of Ghanaian architects in the modernist movement; Asante architectural identity; and social acceptance of earth building in urban areas. She has published in Al Jazeera, Burning House Press, Africa Is A Country, and The Metropole. Kuukuwa curates Adansisɛm— an architecture collective that documents Ghanaian architecture theory, research and practice, and runs accra archive— an architecture archives digitisation project. She also co-founded and runs sociarchi— a social architectural enterprise that advocates for, and provides architectural services to people who ordinarily cannot afford architects.

Philipp Meuser
Born 1969, Managing director of Meuser Architekten GmbH and head of DOM publishers. From 1991 to 1995, studied architecture at the Berlin Technical University. From 1995 to 1996, editorial work for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Switzerland. Part-time postgraduate studies in the History and Theory of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zürich), graduating in 1997. PhD on the Soviet Mass Housing (Berlin Technical University, 2015). Federal Cross of Merit for cultural and scientific exchange with the states of the former Soviet Union (2018). From 1996 to 2001, policy advisor to the Senate Department for Urban Development as part of the Stadtforum Berlin. Visiting Professorship at the Kazakh National Technical University, Almaty (2015). Tutor at the Strelka Institute Moscow (2016/2017) and the Architectural Association London (Easter Island Visiting School 2017). Since 2018 Honorary Professorship at the O.M. Beketov National University of Urban Economy in Kharkiv, Ukraine. 2022 Visiting Professor for Public Humantities at Brown University in Providence/Rhode Island.

Livingstone Mukasa
Livingstone Mukasa’s career has included architectural practice, urban design, master planning, real estate development, and sustainable development consulting. He founded and managed Archability, an online architectural crowdsourcing start-up, and Afritecture, an online platform on architecture in Africa. He is currently principal of Mahali, a collaborative design studio focused on cultural and contextual architectural engagement, and a frequent guest reviewer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s School of Architecture. Passionate about architecture in Africa, he is coauthor and associate editor of Theorising Architecture in Sub-Saharan Africa (DOM publishers, 2021), and Architectural Guide Sub-Saharan Africa (DOM publishers, 2021, with Philipp Meuser and Adil Dalbai), a seven–volume documentation of the architecture of all 49 countries south of the Sahara. Born in Kampala, Uganda, he holds a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from New York Institute of Technology, and graduate certificates from the Graduate School of Architecture, Harvard University in Urban Housing and Mixed–Use Developments.

Rexford Assassie Opong
Rexford Assassie Opong (PhD) is currently a Full Professor of Architecture and Dean of International Programmes Office of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi. He is a practicing architect of over twenty years’ experience. He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture from the premier Liverpool School of Architecture — University of Liverpool; Masters in Urban Planning and Management from University of Rome-La Sapienza; Postgraduate Diploma in Architecture, KNUST; and Bachelor of Science in Design, UST, Kumasi. He researches and has widely published on the following topics: Architectural Identity, Metamorphosis and Disorderliness, Ecological Aesthetics and Architecture, Architecture and Fractals, The Built Environment and Climate Change,Urbanism and Architectural Modernism in Africa, Architecture and Health, Architectural Habitus, Architecture and land, Taste in Architecture, Architecture; Science and Arts Debate, and Kinship, Land, and Architecture in Urban Ghana.

Organiser and chair: Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
Albert is a Lecturer (teaching) at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Previously, he co-curated the public programme and publications of the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL, edited the digital platform Ceramic Architectures and worked as an architect in Bombas Gens Arts Centre. He is a CHASE-funded PhD student at Birkbeck and the Architectural Association with the project ‘Resource: Humans Matter and the Patterns of International Planning c. 1957-76’, whilst cataloguing the archive of educator, architect, and planner Otto Koenigsberger. His coedited volume ‘Wastiary: A bestiary of waste’ will be published soon he hopes. He has published in Architecture&Culture, Espacio Fronterizo, and The Scottish Left Review, curated shows at UCL and the Polytechnic University of Valencia, and exhibited his artworks at Museu Nogueira Da Silva. He is currently a visiting researcher at the Department of Architecture, KNUST.

Full event details and booking

This event is held as part of Arts Week 2022, a festival of the latest creativity and research from Birkbeck’s School of Arts

Call for Papers for Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene Symposium

By jacksoniain

March 29, 2022

Africa, British Colonial Architecture, call for papers, Climate, Conferences, Global Architecture, Heritage, Historiography

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Call for Papers for Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene Symposium

Modern Heritage in the Anthropocene is part of the MoHoA global collaborative and builds on the Modern Heritage of Africa symposium hosted by the University of Cape Town in September 2021. Coordinated by The Bartlett’s Professor Edward Denison and Head of the University of Liverpool’s School of Architecture, Professor Ola Uduku, along with partners at the University of Cape Town, the Africa World Heritage Fund and around the world, this upcoming hybrid symposium responds to an age of planetary crisis in which a precarious present reflects an inequitable past and a perilous future.

The international railway settlement of Fushun (northeast China), with its modern town planning and the Ryuho Colliery, built by Denang and Siemens, and home to one of the world’s largest open cast mines in the 1930s.

Modern heritage in all its forms and from around the world is the subject of this multidisciplinary symposium, presenting the paradox of being of modernity and yet threatened by its consequences. MoHoA was originally conceived within an African context to interrogate this paradox because the continent encapsulates the historical inequities that characterise the modern and its associated notions of development and progress while also facing the highest rates of urbanisation over the next 30 years, demanding new approaches to the past and present that achieve equitable and sustainable futures on a planetary scale. The outcomes of the two symposia will synthesise in the recognition of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage.

Call for papers

Submissions are invited from researchers, academics, and practitioners. The organisers are seeking papers or equivalent submissions that critically engage with reframing, re-evaluating, decentring, and decolonising recent, hidden or marginalised pasts in pursuit of achieving more equitable, just, and sustainable futures. Participants will contribute to the completion of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage, supporting policy change at a global level through our partner UNESCO.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

Practices of coloniality, decentring and decolonising history and historiography
Considerations and conceptualisations of multiple modernities
Modern heritage and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Planetary futures and the Anthropocene
Infrastructure and (post)-industrial heritage
Combining culture and nature, and the role of natural heritage in society
Challenging binaries (rural/urban, modern/traditional, nature/culture, tangible/intangible, racial/non-racial etc)
Public space and memory: memorialisation, commemoration and remembering
Modern heritage and the World Heritage Convention

How to submit

Submissions should be in English or French and should be emailed to mohoa@ucl.ac.uk by 31 May 2022.

Notification of acceptance will be provided by 30 June. Abstracts should be a maximum of 300 words or equivalent format (e.g. film shorts, blog, or Instagram story) for other types of digital submissions.

Selected papers or presentations will be published as part of the MoHoA Book Series after the conference and selected extended papers will appear in a special edition of the journal ‘Curator’.

More here: http://www.mohoa.uct.ac.za

OPENING EXHIBITION BORDERS, MOBILITIES AND LANDSCAPES: Trains & Tracks in Africa

By jacksoniain

March 8, 2022

Africa, Conferences

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INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Trains & Tracks in Africa — A Dialogue on Infrastructures and Mobilities in Africa

Thursday 17.03.22, 9h30 – 19h00 / Location: Africa Museum, Leuvensesteenweg 13, 3080 Tervuren

During this international conference, a series of scholars from different disciplines (history, anthropology, political science, architecture,..) and backgrounds will present their (ongoing) research on railways in Africa and engage in a conversation with Anne Wetsi Mpoma and two artists currently in residence in the context of Europalia Arts Festival, Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe and Arnaud Makalou. Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka will start the day with a keynote lecture. Please note that interventions will be in French and/or English, with no simultaneous translation.

More info on the program via: https://assets.ctfassets.net/h7vzq2rtwdqn/55gupj1LDvB36PCNfN1Yh/418013f8b9a463687bfe86b13752e562/Trains___Tracks_in_Africa_1603.pdf

and: https://webappsx.ugent.be/eventManager/events/exhibitionbordersmobilitieslandscapes

and: https://www.africamuseum.be/fr/see_do/agenda/trains_tracks/17.03.22

OPENING EXHIBITION BORDERS, MOBILITIES AND LANDSCAPES

Wednesday 16.03.22, 19h00 – 22h00 / Location: VANDENHOVE, Rozier 1, 9000 Gent

We will open a work-in-progress exhibition of work produced by students and staff of the Department of Architecture and Planning of Ghent University on the theme of the railway in Africa, conducted over the last couple of years. Two keynote lectures, one by historian Geert Castryck (University of Leipzig, Germany) and one by digital humanities scholar Chao Tayiana Maina (African Digital Heritage, Kenya) will provide a broader context on the theme. The interventions will be in English.

Document Fever: Encounters with the architecture of the *colonial architecture archive

By jacksoniain

February 10, 2022

Conferences, Heritage, Historiography

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Document Fever: Encounters with the architecture of the *colonial architecture archive: Organised by the Architectural Association in collaboration with the Architecture Space & Society Centre, Birkbeck School of Arts

Date: Friday 25 February 2022 Time:10:00 – 17:00

Fever: An intense enthusiasm for or interest in a person, pastime, event, etc., typically widespread but short-lived; an obsession, a craze / A state of intense nervous excitement or agitation / to elevate in intensity, temperature, etc., to heighten emotionally. OED

Book here

An architectural archive is expected to contain drawings, plans, maps, photographs, models, and sample materials. However, the archives of post-war architects working for the United Nations — Jacky Tyrwhitt, Charles Abrams, or Otto Koenigsberger, to name a few — contain letters, invoices, book drafts, repetitive lecture notes, photographs, press cuttings, and, mostly, reports, piles of them. Reports consist of from two to dozens of typed pages with advice on the development of the environment as a whole, spanning issues such as landscape, ecology, economy, housing, migration, labour, water management, and others. These reports are mostly addressed at regions in Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia that were colonised at the time or had recently gained independence.

It is common to find report-based archives in Western departments of architecture and architectural institutions. Both the architectural category and the Western homes of these archives could be questioned for their interdisciplinary content and their embodiment of neo/post/post-/re/trans/inter/—/*colonial relations. These probably get complicated by other questions: the exiled condition of some of its authors, the aspirations of the UN and of the recipients of these reports, or the political and economic international dynamics behind these reports. Maybe one first question is about what these archives represent: is it their authors, their ideas and practices, their network, the lands and peoples reported, or something other?

This symposium adds to the work on *colonial networks of planning consultants since the 2000s and specifically to the work from critical studies and the social sciences developed in the 2010s on *colonial exchanges between Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, US, UK, Nigeria, South Africa, Singapore, The Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, Ghana, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Belgium. This work has until now scrutinised these archives through theses on climate and race, capitalism and extraction, green infrastructure, socialist worldmaking, and misogynist endurances, amongst others. None of these topics were explicit in the archives which are partial, unclassified, and under rigorous custodianship most of the times. This symposium focusses on the feverish encounter with the architecture of the archive that made possible these forms of research and asks how to make ‘privilegings, elisions, and silencing’ of the ‘work of the archive’ present, accessible, and suggestive, if at all appropriate, in the architectural *colonial archive?

The symposium will explore the following themes:

space, geoposition, and structure of the archive;
property, representation, and audience;
socio-cultural pressures;
fantasies of the writer of the document;
encounters with the document;
critical approaches to the architectural category of these papers;
intellectual frameworks to approach these archives;
evidence finding and the power of “critical fabulations”;
emotional fever in the archive;
connection to the material and personal qualities of the archive;
and the way one would have liked that the encounter with the archive could be framed for future researchers.

CONFIRMED PARTICIPANTS:

Keynote: Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South with Emphasis on Africa at the University of Bayreuth in Germany)

Irene Appeaning Addo (Senior Research Fellow, Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana)

Ed Bottoms (Archivist, Architectural Association)

Albert Brenchat-Aguilar (PhD student Art History, Architectural Association and Birkbeck; curator, IAS, UCL)

Mark Crinson (Professor of Architectural History, Birkbeck)

Ayala Levin (Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, UCLA)

Shivani Shedde (PhD student Architectural History, Princeton)

Shirley Surya (Curator, M+)

Ola Uduku (Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture, Liverpool)

H. Koon Wee (Architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture, HKU and SKEW Collaborative)

“Diaspora Remittance Flows: Restitution, Culture and Capital – ASAUK Biennial Conference 2022”

By jacksoniain

January 7, 2022

Africa, call for papers, Conferences

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“Diaspora Remittance Flows: Restitution, Culture and Capital – ASAUK Biennial Conference 2022”

We are pleased to announce the launch of the 2022 ASAUK biennial conference titled: “Diaspora Remittance Flows: Restitution, Culture and Capital”. This is an innovative conference which seeks to harness the global two-year involvement with online communications with our physical engagement with conferencing which we hope will return in 2022. This conference is conceived to enable our research colleagues in Africa (Ibadan, Nigeria and Nairobi, Kenya) to be part of the research conversation at the 29th ASAUK biennial conference, via the zoom media platform. We also will be running a smaller traditional in-person conference in Liverpool addressing this and other ASAUK member-determined themes.

Running from August 31^st – September 4^th, 2022, the ASAUK Biennial conference will be a unique two-part conference. With British Academy funding, the first part will take place entirely online and involve ASAUK research colleagues based in Ibadan and Nairobi engaging in the conference themes from Africa based platforms shared across Africa and Liverpool in the UK. This will be followed by a smaller, traditional in-person conference, hosted by the ASAUK at the University of Liverpool.

We invite you to attend the online conference, which is entirely free, and also to come to Liverpool for the ‘in-person’ conference, taking place from Friday 2^nd – Sunday 4^th September. The Liverpool conference will have a smaller audience, and conference panel requirements planned to pre-empt possible ongoing Covid health advice on conference size and appropriately spaced and ventilated conference facilities. Taking this into account, there will be online access to the physical Liverpool conference for a reduced fee.

THE ONLINE CONFERENCE 31^st August – 2^nd September

IBADAN-NAIROBI-LIVERPOOL

Restitution, Culture and Capital

This is an entirely free to attend conference (with registration required).

Hosted by ASAUK colleagues at the IFRA Institute, at the University of Ibadan and the BIEA, Nairobi, the online conference has been directly funded by the British Academy, with generous supplementary funding from the BIEA. It will be delivered entirely online from both Ibadan and Nairobi, using the Zoom platform. Working closely with the Institutes in Ibadan and Nairobi, these interactive conferences will be broadcast on two consecutive days, from Ibadan on Wednesday 31^st August and Nairobi on Thursday, 1^st September. The final part of the online conference will be broadcast from Liverpool on Friday 2^nd September, jointly chaired by the ASAUK and RAS presidents.

We expect to curate and edit the key papers, from Ibadan, Nairobi and Liverpool that will be discussed at this unique online conference series. These with support from the British Academy will form the basis of the ASAUK publication Restitution Culture and Capital in Africa and the Diaspora, a trans-national conversation which will elaborate on the themes of the conference through the publication of the keynote papers and also the responses as recorded by participants at the three conference platforms.

The panel session themes and keynotes for the three day online conference are as follows:

HOSTED ONLINE FROM IFRA, UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN

Curated by Vincent Hiribarren, Director IFRA Ibadan

Ibadan Session 1. DIASPORA FLOWS OF CULTURAL ARTEFACTS TO AND FROM AFRICA

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Zachary Kingdon, Shadreck Chirikure

TBC David Adjaye

Ibadan Session 2 DIASPORA FLOWS OF PEOPLES AND CULTURES TO AND FROM AFRICA

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Saheed Aderinto, Peju Layiwola

TBC David Olusoga, Akosua Adomako Ampofo

HOSTED ONLINE FROM BIEA NAIROBI

Curated by Ambreena Manji + Freda Nkirote, Director of BIEA Nairobi

Nairobi Session 1 RESTITUTIONARY FUTURES: LAND JUSTICE

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Parselelo Kantai

Nairobi Session 2 RESTITUTIONARY FUTURES: A JUST HOME

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Prabha Kotiswaran

LIVERPOOL HOSTED CONCLUDING SESSION

Curated by Ola Uduku and Arunma Oteh

African Diasporas, remittances and capital in a post-Covid era and Viewing the European Black Diaspora in the 2020s

Confirmed Liverpool Keynote Speakers

Onyekachi Wambu Afford UK, Tunde Zack-Williams ASAUK

TBC Miatta Fahnbulleh, New Economics Foundation,

Prior to the online sessions keynote speakers will discuss their papers with Africa-based ECRs in workshop format.

THE LIVERPOOL ASAUK 29^th BIENNIAL CONFERENCE

FRIDAY 2^ND – SUNDAY 4^TH September 2022

The ‘in-person’ Liverpool Conference follows the traditional panel theme format. Whilst the panel theme titled: “Diaspora: Restitution, Culture and Capital“, follows on directly from the online conference, we invite proposals for other panel themes.

As this is planned to be a smaller conference we call on panel proposers to ensure all panel proposals are sent in to the ASAUK conference team by 31^st March, 2022. All proposals need to have the names of the 3 – 4 paper givers, and their abstracts submitted by the 31^st March deadline. This will enable us to plan the conference space and facilities required. It will also mean that we can work to ensure that any documentation required for proposed international participants who might need this will get processed on time. We realise that this is different from the traditional conference format but hope you will join us for this unique, innovative conference in 2022. The 30^th April is the later deadline for individual paper proposals. Due to the smaller conference format, space for individual papers will be limited and we encourage paper givers to consider working with emerging panel themes which will announce from February onwards.

The 29^th ASAUK biennial conference dinner will be held at Liverpool University’s Victoria Gallery and Museum on Saturday 3^rd September. This will also be the venue for announcement and awards ceremony for the Audrey Richards prize, the Fage and Oliver prize and the distinguished Africanist awards ceremony.

For more information about the 29^th ASAUK conference. Please contact the conference organisation team via the email address: asaukconference22@gmail.com. Panel proposals, comprising the 3 – 4 papers with abstracts, can also now be sent to this address.

We will be providing further information as the conference details develop on our website and via social media.

Thank you

Ola Uduku ASAUK President

Three-day online symposium KTH School of Architecture Stockholm 8–10 September 2021: Architectural Training and Research in the Foreign Aid-Funded Knowledge Economy 1950s–1980s

By jacksoniain

August 31, 2021

call for papers, Conferences

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From the 1950s to the late 1980s, the politics and economies of foreign aid — instigated by both the ‘capitalist West’ as well as the ‘communist East’ — gave rise to a whole infrastructure destined to assist the progress of ‘developing countries’ on their ‘path to development’. The various North-South exchanges that took place in the name of ‘development’ have left a deep imprint on the geopolitical landscape of postcolonial Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

(1) Bertil Melin, the Swedish director of the Nordic Tanganyika Project in Kibaha, showing a model of low-cost housing to (2) President Julius Nyerere, c. 1963-64. To the far left, (3) Mr. Dennis, the carpenter who made the models, co-designed the housing project, and “test-lived“ in the first constructed house with his family. From Torvald Åkesson, ‘Education – In Marble Halls or Under Trees. Low-Cost Houses in East Africa, Especially Ethiopia and Tanzania’, compiled self-published report, c. 1965, Stockholm. Collection KTH Library.

Largely instituted through bilateral relations between individual states, these ‘aid’ initiatives involved not only financial and material resources but also various forms of knowledge and expertise; as such, the modalities of this global, foreign aid-funded infrastructure boosted the creation and reinforcement of all sorts of institutional actors to efficiently exchange knowledge — largely through training courses, educational programs and/or research projects. In the light of widespread rural migration and intensive, rapid urbanization processes, expertise on the built environment was a particularly salient form of knowledge to the aims of foreign aid. Hence, architecture, urbanism and planning were no strangers to an emerging foreign aid-funded knowledge economy — a context in which the production and circulation of knowledge were intimately tied to the political-economic value attributed to them by foreign aid diplomacy.

How did architectural knowledge figure in foreign aid-sourced international relations, and what frameworks were set in place to efficiently exchange that knowledge?

For this two-day symposium, we seek scholarly work that critically analyzes, contextualizes, or theorizes the establishment and functioning of such institutional actors, training courses, educational programs, research centers, and other infrastructures for knowledge exchange that emerged under the aegis of development and targeted ‘Third World’ clients. We welcome a wide range of methodological and creative perspectives as well as less empirical (but well-informed) theoretical approaches that interpret this phenomenon from a postcolonial or decolonizing perspective. We also encourage contributions that scrutinize the intersections of these histories with discussions of gender, race, religion and nationalism.

More information and Register here: https://www.architectureforeignaid.arch.kth.se

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Online Modernist University Campus Architecture Writing Workshop: A Ghana-Nigeria-UK collaboration 2021

By jacksoniain

July 2, 2021

Africa, Conferences, Ghana, Heritage, Historiography, Nigeria, transnational, Tropical Architecture

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Online Modernist University Campus Architecture Writing Workshop: A Ghana-Nigeria-UK collaboration

The third iteration of the African Architecture Writing Workshop has involved multi-disciplinary teams of young students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) from Universities in both Ghana and Nigeria in developing a series short written articles focused on personal views of university campus buildings in Ghana and Nigeria. The ECRs worked directly with the young students as mentors to encourage and develop their writing style.

The ECRs have also been tasked with compiling and editing student work to create a series of gazette entries for the Modernist University Campus Buildings in West Africa project. Aside from the written component the ECRs and students have also taken a set of photographs which will form the basis for a future planned photography workshop to be run in association with the International Documentation of Modern Buildings and Landscapes, (Docomomo) team Germany.

The British Academy-funded workshop took place over two weeks starting at the University of Ghana, Legon led by Co-I Dr Irene Appeaning Addo, with support from ECRs Kuukuwa Manful, Emmanuel Ofori-Sarpong, Dr Ayisha Baffoe-Eshun, and Yaw Asare; as well as guest mentor Dr Joseph Oduro-Frimpong. There was a guest lecture from Professor Lesley Lokko. Students from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, University of Ghana, and Central University College took part in the workshop. Arc Ruth Anne Richardson, Arc Tony Asare, Dr Edem Adotey, and Professor Iain Jackson reviewed the students’ final written pieces that were focused on three buildings on the University of Ghana Campus; Commonwealth, Volta and Legon Halls.

After a hand over day the Nigeria team’s workshop was led by Co-I Dr Nnezi Uduma-Olugu, and involved three institutions, the University of Lagos, University of Jos and the University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus. Each institution had a number of ECRs who worked at mentoring the interdisciplinary group of students who had enrolled at each of the workshops. As with the Ghana workshop a number of guest speakers including Prof Bogdana Prucnal-Ogunsote, (University of Jos) Kofo Adeleke (Legacy-92 organisation Lagos) and Dr Onyekiekwe Ijeoma, Nigeria commission for Museums. For the Nigerian final critical reviews attended by Prof Lukasz Stanek (University of Manchester) and Dr Joseph Oduro-Frimpong (Asheshi University Ghana) the ECRs presented their edited summaries of the student-written work and views on campus buildings in the three cities.

ECRs then presented their workshop experience at the Lagos Studies Association International Online Conference at a roundtable panel on conservation challenges in Africa chaired by Profs Uduku and Lawanson, Manchester School of Architecture, Manchester Metropolitan University, and University of Lagos respectively.

Whilst students and ECRs met in covid secure ways at their respective campuses all lectures and reviews took place entirely online, with students and ECRs able to work from ethernet-wifi equipped room spaces at the University of Ghana, and all three Nigerian collaborating Universities.

Currently ECRs are working on the editing and production of the initial phase of the Modernist African University Campus Buildings Gazette, this will be critically reviewed by Prof Miles Glendinning, Docomomo Scotland and Director SCCS University of Edinburgh. Watch this space…