Architecture of Independence - African Modernism
Vitra Design Museum Gallery
"When many countries in Central and Sub-Saharan Africa gained their independence in the 1960s, experimental and futuristic architecture became a principal means by which the young nations expressed their national identities. The exhibition in the Vitra Design Museum Gallery is one of the first presentations of this remarkable period of more recent architectural history. This exhibition was researched and curated by architect and author Manuel Herz, with a substantial contribution by photographer Iwan Baan. The exhibition documents more than 80 buildings in five countries; Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia, Ghana and Senegal. The often heroic and daring designs of parliament buildings, central banks, stadiums, conference centers, universities and independence memorials mirror the forward-looking spirit that was dominant in these countries at the time. However, this architecture also represents the difficulties, contradictions and dilemmas that the young nations experienced in their independence process, as building designs and architects were often imported from foreign countries, if not from one of the former colonial powers.”
"I have tried to suggest that precarity is the condition against which several new social movements struggle. Such movements do not seek to overcome interdependency or even vulnerability as they struggle against precarity; rather, they seek to produce the conditions under which vulnerability and interdependency become liveable. This is a politics in which performative action takes bodily and plural form, drawing critical attention to the conditions of bodily survival, persistence and flourishing within the framework of radical democracy. If I am to lead a good life, it will be a life lived with others, a live that is no life without those others. I will not lose this I that I am; whoever I am will be transformed by my connections with others, since my dependency on another, and my dependability, are necessary in order to live and to live well. Our shared exposure to precarity is but one ground of our potential equality and our reciprocal obligations to produce together conditions of liveable life. In avowing the need we have for one another, we avow as well basic principles that inform the social, democratic conditions of what we might still call ‘the good life’. These are critical conditions of democratic life in the sense that they are part of an ongoing crisis, but also because they belong to a form of thinking and acting that responds to the urgencies of our time."
"Can one lead a good life in a bad life?" Judith Butler, Adorno Prize Lecture.
Weekend Lagos night vibes. #lagos #nigeria #shrine #everydayafrica #personalshots #yagazieemezi (at THE NEW AFRIKA SHRINE)
The Sirens, 1956, by Haitian artist Rigaud Benoit
Barkley L. Hendricks, Icon for My Man Superman (Superman never saved any black people - Bobby Seale), 1969
RAMM:∑LL:Z∑∑
"Of whom and of what are we contemporaries? And, first and foremost, what does it mean to be contemporary?" Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?, Paris, Rivages, 2008. Photo: Icarus 13, Kiluanji Kia Henda
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