The Chimurenga Chronic

Author: lungiletech

  • FESTAC ’77 – the Book and LP soon come!

    Early in 1977, thousands of artists, writers, musicians, activists and scholars from Africa and the black diaspora assembled in Lagos for FESTAC ’77, the 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. With a radically ambitious agenda underwritten by Nigeria’s newfound oil wealth, FESTAC ’77 would unfold as a complex, glorious and excessive culmination of a half-century of transatlantic and pan-Africanist cultural-political gatherings.

    Devised by Chimurenga and edited by Ntone Edjabe, this is the first publication to consider FESTAC in all its cultural-historic complexity, addressing the planetary scale of the event alongside the personal and artistic encounters it made possible.

    As the tenth title in Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series and the third in Chimurenga’s Chimurenga Library series, the book features a bespoke expanded format and design scheme, and gathers extensive unseen photographic and archival materials, interviews and new commissions by Akin Adesokan, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, Dominique Malaquais and Elvira Dyangani Ose, among others, and archival texts, materials, images and photographs by Wole Soyinka, Audre Lorde, Allioune Diop, Marilyn Nance, Barkley Hendricks, J.D. Okhai Ojeikere, Betye Saar, Sun Ra and many more.

    Published by Chimurenga and Afterall Books, in association with Asia Art Archive, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and RAW Material Company, 2019.

    Get a taste with Ntone Edjabe and Kodwo Eshun (The Otolith Collective) who listen closely to records for and from FESTAC ’77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos, Nigeria, from 15 January 1977 to 12 February 1977.

    Also: as a 15-year old Michael McMillan wrote an essay that led to him being chosen as one of the “Black Britain” delegates at FESTAC ’77: the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture held in Lagos and Kaduna. Time travellin’ via the Pan African Space Station (PASS), Michael McMillan delved into his personal arkive to recall the life-changing experiences.

    Both these sessions were part of the PASS landing at The Showroom, London. Listen to more here.

  • Chimurenga Named Winner 2018–20 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice

    The New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics announced Chimurenga is the winner of its 2018–20 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice. We give thanks! The award will bring us for a short-term residency in New York in 2019, as well as get Chimurenga on the syllabus of New School classes, in addition we’ll host a conference, mount an exhibition and release a publication… watch this space!

    The prize’s jury was chaired by Koyo Kouoh, artistic director of the Dakar-based RAW Material Company, with Richard William Hill, Canada Research Chair at Emily Carr University of Art & Design; Carin Kuoni, Vera List Center director and chief curator; Nontobeko Ntombela, curator; UZma Z. Rizvi, associate professor in the Pratt Institute’s Anthropology and Urban Studies department; and Maya Wiley, senior vice president for social justice at the New School.

    Previous winners of the award include Theaster Gates, the anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara, and the Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves.

  • Pree Under Pressure

    WHITE WOMEN’S TEARS – plenty flowed at the launch of the first issue of PREE, a magazine of new Caribbean writing conducted out of Kingston by our comrade the brilliant editor and critic Annie Paul.

    Exhibit A, this beautiful essay by Kei Miller which had been withdrawn from the inaugural issue – because the floods.

    Thankfully it is back online – dig in!

    Along with the second issue, which centers on the theme “Pressure”. “Pressure buss pipe, yes. But, pressure also creates diamonds. What does pressure do to and for us tethered to the Caribbean?” Takes include fiction by Patrina Pink, Justin Haynes, Richie Maitland, Opal Palmer Adisa, Kwasi Shade, Agostinho Pinnock and more; poetry by Sonia Farmer, Anna Corniffe, Jovanté Anderson, Ubaldimir Guerra and more; essays that enlist the visual to unsettle our complacency with spectacular and everyday forms of oppression and violence; explorations into Trinidad Oil; and a look at big dreams and tiny countries; guidelines on how to pressure cook a goat; memoirs, articles reviews and more.

    As Editor Annie Paul writes: PREE was born out of the desire to be part of shaping the new, of providing an experimental, technologically savvy platform to elicit forms of writing emerging from the transformed scapes of the Caribbean, a postcolonial Caribbean not yet fully decolonized but one willing to participate in the global ebbs and flows that sometimes threaten to submerge us. Can we grab a passing wave and ride it with the dexterity and aplomb of the region’s musicians and athletes? Can we show that we are perfectly capable of following in their wake while surfing new Caribbean imaginaries built on the world handed down to us by earlier generations? What does the writerly gaze look like almost two decades into the 21st century? Is new writing illuminating the Creolescapes we occupy? Are there new horizons of readership and writership? Can the archipelago be written? In what tone of voice and in what accents do we write it? Can it be written as it’s spoken?

  • P.A.S.S. HARARE

    From 9 – 12 November, the Pan African Space Station (PASS) landed in The National Gallery of Zimbabwe (NGZ) in the centre of Harare.

    In collaboration with visual artist Kudzanai Chiurai, who launched his first ever solo exhibition in his home country titled ‘We Need New Names’, Chimurenga installed the PASS studio as a public research platform towards a Zimbabwe focused issue of the Chimurenga Chronic.

    Looking into the inventions of Zimbabwe, the programming examined music as the paradigm through which the country and region’s political history is told and archived. Whatever Zimbabwe is, and is becoming, already exists in the sound-worlds produced in the region. PASS in Harare invited musicians, artists, writers, cultural producers and rebels based in Harare and beyond in studio to uncover these worlds.

    Now replayable: #PanAfricanSpaceStation Harare sessions, recorded/broadcast live from National Gallery of Zimbabwe. Featuring The Monkey Nuts, Weaver Press, Tinofireyi Aero5ol Zhou, Chirikure Chirikure, Netsayi, Kudzanai Chiurai and Pungwe Nights. Tune in for conversations on Zim Rock, Literary Initiatives, Post-Chimurenga Postures and (why) We Need New Names.

  • The Invention of Africa by Franco & T.P.OK Jazz

    – Ntone Edjabe

    A few years ago, while researching the political history of Congo/Zaire/Congo via the country’s music archive, particularly through the output of Luambo Makiadi aka Franco, we turned to the legendary record collection of “Jumbo” Donald Vanrenen – a scholar of late-style rumba and early soukouss (a sound he helped construct via various A&R gigs in the-then burgeoning studio scenes of Paris and London). Jumbo didn’t only lend records for this mix, he offered advice, contacts, context. That is the kind of man he was – to his last day here, ears tuned to what is next. Go well, elder.