African Mobilities

African Mobilities is a platform, an exhibition and a series of workshops and exchanges curated by Dr. Mpho Matsipa and Prof. Andres Lepik that culminated in the traveling exhibition African Mobilities: This is not a Refugee Camp at the Architekturmuseum, Germany.

For Praia Exchange, Architect and Designer Patti Anahory and Curator Paula Nascimento engage in workshops, lecture, and master classes. The workshop proposes to gather a variety of creative and multidisciplinary minds/makers to explore the possibilities of deconstruction of the “Lusophone narrative” as well as issues of mobility from an island perspective.

Praia Exchange concept note:
Narratives have been the foundations for fixing the relationship between geography and (cultural) identity. Rhetoric and myths have been anchors in the definition(s) of Cape Verde (Praia) as a geostrategic territorial condition of proximities and distances, which have forged imaginaries of belonging (and exclusion). Hailed for its geo/cultural exceptionalism it is a space rooted in forced, desired, restricted and subversive passages.
Luanda, on the other hand, is a city composed of different cities, islands, or pockets of cultures and identities, erased histories, denied from mainstream narratives. As the putative boundaries between formal and informal blur and the constant transit and morphing of spaces become a norm, questions of what is it that makes it a City arise.
How do we create links and establish possible connections between – Praia and Luanda – beyond the constructed notion of a Lusophone heritage and a linguistic connection?
For the exhibition, an installation comprising of the manifesto Towards a new urban energy for Luanda which further extended the ideas initiated in the project Beyond Entropy Angola into the possibilities of creating or domesticating space.