In myriad ways, Fugitive Archives embody and earnestly engage processes of ‘unlearning’. As Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung sensed, unlearning is not forgetting, not deletion, or cancellation. Instead, unlearning is expressed through bolder and different writing, commenting and questioning, and giving new footnotes to old, dominant, and flawed narratives[1]. Such processes may ultimately enable us to confront the universalism that purports the hegemony of knowledge production that underpins societies in the wake – to think with Christina Sharpe[2]. And as a subtle blow to dominant discourses, Fugitive Archives call for much-needed extra-disciplinarity by way of intentional integration of new footnotes to methodologies entrenched in Western knowledge traditions and archival practices.
Borne out of the research initiative Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture (2019-2022), by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, this assemblage brings together an array of architectural scholars including Dooren Adengo, Dele Adeyemo, Warebi Gabriel Brisibe & Ramota Obagah-Stephen, Rachel Lee & Monika Motylinska, Ikem Stanley Okoye, Cole Roskam, Lukasz Stanek and Huda Tayob. In coming together, each of these scholars offers an epistemic shift that seeks to circumvent traditional modes of inquiry, pedagogy, and archival practice, inviting us to reconsider how (African) spatial histories are recorded and remembered.
Fugitive Archives begs the question of what it means to conduct primary research in places marked by the enduring legacies of colonialism. In thoughtfully acknowledging the limitations, fragments, and silences inherent to archival practices, the three, richly illustrated chapters comprising this assemblage bring to the fore three distinct toolboxes, namely grey literature (first-person accounts and manifestos), ephemera (oral histories, memories, and personal documents), and cultural production (music, theatre, and films) that extend our inquiries beyond conventional ways of seeing and knowing. In doing so, they eloquently and effectively draw parallels to similar toolsets as those offered by Sónia Vaz Borges (Errant Archive[3]) and Saidiya Hartman (Critical Fabulation[4]) and invite us to navigate the complex nexus of memory, power, and representation in architectural discourse. Moreover, these toolsets make visible the transformative potentials that lie in counter-narratives, in rewriting overlooked histories, and above all, reclaiming and reshaping archival records in formerly colonized contexts.
Margarida Waco
[1] Bonaventura Soh Bejeng Ndikung & Paul Goodwin, Epistemic Disobedience. In: Q-Notes – Questions in Theory and Art Practices, Vol. 1. Marissa J. Moorman and Monica de Miranda, eds. 2020. Hangar Books.
[2] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake – On Blackness and Being. 2016. Duke University Press.
[3] See Sónia Vaz Borges, On the Space of Imaginations and the Space of Memories – Remembering the Conakry PAIGC Headquaters, 2018. In: The Funambulist No. 21, Space and Activism. Léopold Lambert, ed.
[4] See Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts, 2008, Small Axe.
