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Impossible cities, improbable artists: encounters with Africa at the edges of memory
Art Journal, Winter, 2004 by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
Africas: The Artist and the City; A Journey and an Exhibition. Essays by Pep Subiros, Simon Njami, Kobena Mercer, Yacouba Konate, Kan-Si, and Akinbode Akinbiyi. Barcelona: Centre de Cultural Contemporania de Barcelona, 2001. 224 pp., 219 color ills., 135 b/w. $39.95 paper.
Georges Adeagbo: Archeology of Motivations; Rewriting History. Edited and with an introduction by Silvia Eiblmayr. Essays by Okwui Enwezor, Elizabeth Harney, Stephan Kohler, Harald Szeemann, and others. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002. 107 pp., 48 color ills., 2 b/w. $16.95 paper.
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Africas: The Artist and the City, a catalogue by Pep Subiros, evaluates African cities and the improbable conditions of their existence as vital centers of local and global artistic discourses. The catalogue focuses on contemporary African artists who live in these cities and the nature of their artistic practice in what Okwui Enwezor described recently as cities "under siege." (1) Italo Calvino once wrote that any description of a city should encompass all narratives of its past. He notes, however, that the city "does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps ... every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls." (2) The constantly shifting nature of this inscription suggests that cities are archives of memory whose structural landscape contains various histories of dominion and desire.
African cities encode specific histories of political and cultural interaction with Europe, especially in the spatial relations of a postcolonial order that engendered complex urbanization projects all over Africa. From 1960 onward, many independent African countries began construction on vast new capital cities where narratives of national history were enacted. These cities became magnetic nodes that attracted massive immigration from rural areas, their hyperactive growth overwhelming all existing plans and projections. (3) African cities have thus become symbols of chaotic urban existence and are seen by the West as cautionary tales of an undesirable future. With the economic collapse of many African countries, these cities became intolerable places to live, although they continue to draw migrants in large numbers. Since African cities are also primary arenas of artistic practice, the ensuing difficulty of life in the city extends to contemporary African artists as well.
Pep Subiros, who served as exhibition curator and principal essayist of Africas, traveled to Dakar, Abidjan, Lagos, Johannesburg, and Harare to document the conditions of artistic practice and select individual artists to participate in a 2001 exhibition in Barcelona. Subiros suggests that we need to study Africa to understand what its experience of hyperactive urbanization means for the Europe of the future. He achieved this understanding by searching for artists who engaged the urban African environment and also commented on their city's location within contemporary global culture. His search focused on sub-Saharan African cities because he concluded that North African cities channeled a cultural ethos oriented more to the Middle East. Although he does not state this explicitly, his arbitrary division reiterates an assumption that North African cities are superior to their sub-Saharan counterparts because they share in the history of Western culture through their location in the Mediterranean world. This division denies the existence of viable sub-Saharan cities and the long history of interaction between the Mediterranean world and sub-Saharan Africa.
However, Subiros also argues that we cannot speak of Africa in monolithic terms and must consider, as an integral part of the continent, locales like London and Paris where sizeable expatriate African populations are engaged in an active process of culture making. These populations negotiate their African identities in the diaspora and constantly struggle against attempts to render them invisible in discourses about contemporary African cultures. By focusing on these intercontinental centers of African culture, Subiros revises the geography of contemporary national identity to accommodate the vast cultural migrations engendered by globalization. However, he does not pursue what his revision implies for analysis of the interaction between continental and expatriate locations of African culture.
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The curator notes that Western media ubiquitously associate African cities with chaos because of the intensity and speed of the processes of social change on the continent. He quickly learns that this perception fails to account for the inventive dynamism from which urban African residents have written new texts of resilience, survival, and growth. (4) As Sally Wade of Dakar explains to him in great detail during his visit to Senegal, when it comes to African cities, "all the usual categories and definitions are of no use here: formal/informal, public/private, traditional/modern, countryside/city, here they are all mixed up, all in constant transformation" (21).
