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.
Sense of Space by Masixole Ncevu (adocs Verlag, 2025)
We go inside first, decide what kind of world
we want to experience and then project that world outside
making it the truth as we experience it.
This book attempts to explore how people locate themselves vis-a-vis others, objects and things within a time-space continuum. Furthermore, it contextually sheds light on the correlation between space embedded meanings and the sense of place. In this book, the preposition of place takes a closer examination of the relations between objects and things through the lens of meaning reconfiguring moves and interactions in time and space. The relations between entities/objects/things offers bi-directional insights into orientations as is impacted by emotional, perceptional and preferential state of worlding among other attributes that direct people‘s positioning within contexts. The project Prepositions of Place that emerges as key within this book follows and attends to questions of how people, structures and landscapes spatially affect one another? What relations and meaning emerge and submerge within space–be it natural or artificial? In the process, visual signs, the (re)emergence of infrastructures and contextual speech reshape the building blocks for place making.
Through artistic works and lens, the project metaphorically and figuratively express how personal senses from sight, touch and hearing collapse and combine to orient individuals in space and time. The relation of individuals through the space-time continuum also offers external stimuli to contrive and build an immersive spatial experience.