What could the curriculum be – if it was designed by the people who dropped out of school so that they could breathe? The latest issue of Chimurenga provides alternatives to prevailing educational pedagogy. Through fiction, essays, interviews, poetry, photography and art, contributors examine and redefine rigid notions of essential knowledge.
Presented in the form of a textbook, Chimurenga 15 simultaneously mimics the structure while gutting it. All entries are regrouped under subjects such as body parts, language, grace, worship and news (from the other side), numbers, parents, police and many more. Through a classification system that is both linear and thematic, the textbook offers multiple entry points into a curriculum that focuses on the un-teachable and values un-learning as much as it’s opposite.
Inside: Amiri Baraka waxes poetic on the theoretics of Be-Bop; Coco Fusco flips the CIA’s teaching manual for female torturers; Karen Press and Steve Coleman instruct in folk-dancing; Dambudzo Marechera proposes a “guide to the earth”; Dominique Malaquais designs the museum we won’t build; through self-portraits Phillip Tabane and Johnny Dyani offer method to the Skanga (black music family); and Winston Mankunku refuses to teach.
Other contributors include Binyavanga Wainaina, Akin Adesokan, Isoje Chou, Sean O’Toole, Pradid Krishen, E.C. Osundu, Salim Washington, Sefi Atta, Ed Pavlic, Neo Muyanga, Henri-Michel Yere, Medu Arts Ensemble, Aryan Kaganof, Khulile Nxumalo and Walter Mosley amongst others. Cover by Johnny “Mbizo” Dyani.
Gbegbetopia—Maison Gbegbe: An Art-Based Community and Spiritual Center eds. by Sename Koffi Agboudjinou, Mathilde ter Heijne and Messanh Amedegnato (Archive Books, 2024)
Maison Gbegbe is a cultural center in Togo that aims to bring together different cultures, traditions, religions, and knowledge systems, and to create a space for exchange, reconciliation, and critical thinking. The project is a collaborative effort involving members of the Union des Cultes Traditionnels du Togo (UCTT) in Agouegan, L’Africaine d’Architecture, art&dialogue e.V., and a pre-configuration committee. Maison Gbegbe uses artistic research as a collaborative process to address ecological and social crises and to shift paradigms in the way people engage with knowledge and knowledge transfer. The project proposes to sensitize international audiences to other knowledge systems beyond Western epistemology, and to provide opportunities for locals and others to reconnect with and rediscover traditional African cosmologies along the Togolese coast. Maison Gbegbe is intended to serve as a space for exchange and dialogue with the goal of preserving and transmitting traditional and spiritual knowledge. It hopes to provide a place for returned and restituted West African cultural and spiritual assets to be reintegrated into an appropriate context. This publication provides an overview of the process of and motivations behind its creation.