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.
Worldmaking within Politics of Sight and Space was curated by Sarah Abdu Bushra in 2020. Sarah was the inaugural fellow for the ARAK Collection Curatorial Residency fellowship. She is an Ethiopian curator of visual and performing arts exhibitions. Anchored through the contested definition and experiences of locality – as it informs the spatial as well as material narratives of artworks present within the ARAK collection, this exhibition attempts to trace the life of selected artworks from their spaces of creation and showcase the less documented modes of practices that birthed them. Through the work of outlining the arts ecosystem of three East African countries (Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda) and their diaspora, the exhibition focuses on what is particular about this triangular nexus, as it relates to the way artists produce work, the way they build/inhabit a studio, to how they form their networks.