AFRICAN METROPOLIS An imaginary city

An exhibition as a journey through a non-existent city capable of recounting the composite, heterogeneous and stratified identity of the contemporary metropolis

22 June – 4 November 2018 www.maxxi.art | #AfricanMetropolisExhibit

“The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants; we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it.” (Roland Barthes, L’aventure sémiologique)

Rome, 21 June 2018. An exhibition challenging our idea of the metropolis, which uses the intensity and richness of African art to highlight the beauty and the contradictions of the world of today. Is African Metropolis. An imaginary city, the exhibition curated by Simon Njami and co curated by Elena Motisi at MAXXI from 22 June to 4 November 2018.

The exhibition, produced in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation – DGMO, main partner Eni, is part of a broader project strongly supported by Giovanna Melandri, President of the Fondazione MAXXI, dedicated to the vitality of the artistic scene of a continent expanding amidst contradictions and open wounds and is also in line with the museum's research that sees art and culture as instruments of dialogue and cultural diplomacy. The project also features the exhibition road to justice (22 June – 14 October 2018), curated by Anne Palopoli, a reflection on the complexity of the continent, its suffering, its memory, its possible future scenarios, and a rich programme of encounters with artists, architects and writers, film, dance and live music. As Melandri says: “This project is for us an opportunity to meet and work with the African communities present in Rome, to which it is symbolically dedicated: young people from various regions of the continent, Africa-born and second generation, will in fact be the protagonists of an intensive programme of intercultural mediation, interpreting the works on show on the basis of their personal experiences.”

Through the intensity and the richness of African art, the exhibition highlights the beauty and the contradictions of the cities and the world of today. More than 100 works by 34 African artists become elements of an imaginary city, of an exploration that through photography, installations, sculptures, fabrics and videos, recreates the chaos, the wealth, the multi-faceted nature of the contemporary African and global identity.

Wandering, Belonging, Recognising, Imagining and Reconstructing are the metropolitan actions identified by the curators to describe this imaginary city, and to interpret the physical space of the cities we pass through during the course of our existence and the mental space defined by the sensations and emotions they reawaken in us. The artworks are installed as elements of a city skyline, the fruit of a continual stratification of interventions, define a layout in which visitors may lose, recognise and imagine themselves. The exhibition is organized not around a consequential thematic structure, but rather according to a sequence of elements in which large scale works alternate with intimate pieces and site-specific reworkings.

The exhibition winds around works that capture the attention, capable of recreating the sensation of urban space and its dynamics: from the gigantic installations realised for the exhibition by Bili Bidjocka – who has raised on the museum piazza a sculpture referencing the Tower of Babel and the Pharos of Alexandria – and by Youssef Limoud – who has reproduced a building that has collapsed upon itself – to works like that

of Amina Zoubir Prends le bus e regarde (2006) which, thanks to a new presentation, gives visitors the sensation of being on a bus. The installations also include Le salon bibliothèque by Hassan Hajjaj, also realised specifically for this show, which reproduces the space of a bookshop with a Moroccan flavour, in which it is possible to rest, chat and read a selection of books which the curators have asked the artist involved in the exhibition to choose.

The metropolis described in this show is not a “formal” city, of built architecture organized according to planning regulations, but a city built by its inhabitants; hence we encounter works such as Behind This Ambiguity (2015/2018) by Abdulrazaq Awofeso composed of 120 statues, which literally invade the gallery space like a crowd flooding out of a metro station. The street, this lived-in space so rich in visual stimuli, is also rendered through 566 PROTECTED AREA and 768 NO POSTERS (2016) by Onyis Martin, works similar to posters, to writings on walls, to the subliminal messages those who traverse the metropolises are constantly subjected to.

Among the other works on show are a number of shots from the photographic series by Franck Abd-Bakar Fanny My Nights are brighter than your Days (2016), capable of transmitting the idea of that wandering and losing oneself that frequently accompanies out experience and knowledge of a new city. Photos born out of the nocturnal walks of an artist rendered insomniac by the jet-lag caused by long flights between Africa, Europe and the United States: the gaze of a traveller whose body is absent. An immersive story of the city is offered by Symponie urbaine (2017-2018) by Lucas Gabriel, a bilingual sound piece, set in four different areas of the show: here it is the city itself that speaks, with joyous and provocative accents, a city composed of the sounds of many cities, the personality of which transcends confines and geographies.

African Metropolis is a rollercoaster of images and imaginations, with the Falling Houses (2014), the houses suspended upside down by Pascale Marthine Tayou, fragile domestic architecture composed of a myriad coloured images, the fabrics of Abdoulaye Konaté Calao (2016) and Alep (2017), symbols of memory and social protest, and the delicate yet monumental installation by El Anatsui Stressed World (2011), entirely composed of recycled copper. The exhibition tackles current affairs with Bureau d’echange (2014) by Meschac Gaba, who denounces the fact that all raw materials deriving from natural resources have become the object of speculation capable of leading society into profound economic crises, or with World Disorder II (2017) by Paul Onditi, an artist questioning political, structural, social and economic upheavals at local and global levels.

However, there is also room for hope, dreams and new opportunities in the clothes designed by Lamine Badian Kouyaté (Xuly.Bet) that overlook the museum piazza like in a shop window, creations that transmit the values of African modernity and that demonstrate how any culture may become avant-garde, and in the photographs by Mimi Cherono Ng’ok whose gaze transform every place into an emotive landscape associated with the artist’s life and experiences, or those of Sarah Waiswa who in Ballet in Kibera (2017), portrays a group of children from an outlying area of a city involved in a classical dance lesson.

Recognising ourselves in the great heterogeneity of Africa is one of the objectives of the exhibition We ask ourselves whether it is possible to live together in a space seemingly composed of insurmountable differences and whether it is possible to construct a portrait of a city of which we are all inhabitants while being strangers. Exhibiting part of the artistic output of a continent composed of over fifty nations, thousands of cities and millions of inhabitants, African Metropolis succeeds in presenting a universal context. In the deviation provoked by our extraneousness to its culture, it provides the necessary distance for an understanding of the cities of the world, similar to books to be leafed, impossible to recount but only to live, a xenopóleis in which the inhabitant modifies and is modified by the surrounding environment.

This exhibition emerges from one of the strands of research close to MAXXI, exploring the dynamics of the great cities, as was the case with the exhibitions on the creative scene of the Mediterranean dedicated to Istanbul and Beirut; multidisciplinary shows that conjugate artistic research with design, architecture and urban development.

The exhibition has been staged on the occasion of the Second Italy-Africa Conference organized in Rome by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and International cooperation, which has contributed to the production and

the new presentations of the works by Bidjocka, Youssef Limoud, Hassan Hajjaj, Amina Zoubir, Mimi Cherono Ng’ok, James Webb and Sammy Baloji.

Exhibiting artists: Abdoulaye Konaté, Abdulrazaq Awofeso, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Amina Zoubir, Andrew Tshabangu, Antoine Tempé, Bili Bidjocka, Délio Jasse, El Anatsui, Franck Abd-Bakar Fanny, François-Xavier Gbré, Hassan Hajjaj, Hassan Musa, Heba Y. Amin, James Webb, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Lamine Badian Kouyaté (Xuly.Bet), Lavar Munroe, Lucas Gabriel, PEFURA, Meschac Gaba, Mimi Cherono Ng’ok, Nicholas Hlobo, Onyis Martin, Ouattara Watts , Pascale Marthine Tayou, Paul Onditi, Sammy Baloji, Samson Kambalu, Sarah Waiswa, Simon Gush, Youssef Limoud, Joël Andrianomearisoa Godfried Donkor.

The press kit and images of the exhibition can be downloaded from the Reserved Area of the Fondazione MAXXI’s website at http://www.maxxi.art/en/area-stampa/ by typing in the password areariservatamaxxi

MAXXI – National Museum of XXI Century Arts www.maxxi.art - info: 06.320.19.54; [email protected] opening hours: 11.00 AM – 7.00 PM (Tues, Weds, Fri, Sat, Sun) | 11.00 AM - 10.00 PM (Thursday) | closed Mondays. Admittance free for students of art and architecture from Tuesday to Friday

MAXXI PRESS OFFICE +39 06 324861 [email protected]

AFRICAN METROPOLIS. An imaginary city Preface by Giovanna Melandri

Let’s say it out straight: the image, the perception, the knowledge of Africa in our Western part of the world include a series of stereotypes and caricatures concerning profound historical processes which we often know very little about. We don’t really know much about Africa, the real dynamics that disrupt that immense prism of ethnic groups, languages, institutional systems, and religions. The antennae of the Western governments turn on and off when it comes down to the possession and exploitation of Africa’s raw materials, for the ongoing trade deals (often with bloody outcomes) on a geopolitical chequerboard where the essential development indices are still dramatic: terrible poverty, economic growth without wealth distribution, gender exploitation, the fragility of civil society. Africa, to our inattentive eyes, is synonymous with hunger, endemic underdevelopment, authoritarian or tribal regimes, emigration that has lost control in its flight from poverty, persecution, and war. Here, on this side of the Mediterranean, we watch the large boats as they dock (or do not dock at all) with all the human cargo of suffering they bear, suffering that turns to us for help, the promise of a welcome that becomes increasingly difficult, caught as we are between our still unresolved economic crisis and the cold winds of populism and indifference. Yet behind the droughts and the climatic catastrophes (among other things, generated in the world’s Northern hemisphere), beyond the screen of globalization that is much harder for those who have almost nothing, crushed by the scourge of malnutrition, there’s an Africa that’s even more hidden, and that for us is often invisible. It is the continent that doesn’t stop at the meritorious solidarity of the Live Aid concerts, that wishes to try out the microcredit system, that doesn’t give in to the stranglehold of interest rates that must be paid and that are often higher than the funding itself; a continent that pushes for a new strategy of salvation and growth that can be of use to the entire international community. It is an Africa that tries out new models of social entrepreneurship, generative finance, circular economies. Less waste, more science in agriculture, urban experiments that would be unthinkable elsewhere. MAXXI is a window that looks out to these scenarios, it is a place where the cultures and the agendas of other latitudes cross and converse with each other. African Metropolis. An Imaginary City offers us opportunities to immerse ourselves in the excitement of artistic ferment, social tension, creative experiences that take place in a part of the planet whose future will make a difference to all our lives. Our museum-workshop throwing bridges between different expressive languages is enlivened with the works and projects (many of which site- specific) by some forty artists. Their talent, the media they use, the colours, the light their works emanate delve deep into the magmatic phenomena of a mis-recognized continent. Which image of Africa do they convey to us? How can their voice contribute to overcoming the weight of old and new colonialisms and touch the sensitivity of societies and cultures that are so diverse? Even the digital era, a time when we think we can share our everyday agenda with the rest of the world, is unable to bridge the gap between living conditions that are absolutely distinct. Art can help us in our efforts, thanks to the strength of emotions and research. In particular, the exhibition conceived by the critic and writer Simon Njami with Elena Motisi explores the dimension of urban space, it expresses convulsions and interweavings that are generated in the African metropolises, traditions clinging to innovation, the underlying dialogue between communities that can even be very different from each other. It is a field of research to which MAXXI has for years shown its constant commitment. Thanks to the vision of the Artistic Director Hou Hanru, into the spaces of our museum we have given shape and breathed life to the cultural creativity pulsing in Teheran, Istanbul and Beirut. And in several interdisciplinary exhibitions MAXXI Architettura and MAXXI Arte have unearthed the new processes under way in architecture, art, design, and urban design. Africa’s forceful appearance along the way offers felicitous inspiration and challenges us to raise our gaze. As is always the case with MAXXI, African Metropolis. An Imaginary City will be filled with meetings and events addressed to the public, indeed, to the museum’s multiple publics: storytelling, poetry, music, political and geopolitical reflections to name but a few. A wealth of opportunities to reflect on and fill the summer at MAXXI with ideas, sounds, words, and colours.

AFRICAN METROPOLIS. An imaginary city Are we ready? by Hou Hanru

It’s time to talk about Africa, once again! This time it’s no longer, or not merely, about an array of exotic clichés, from its wilderness to its savage “beauty”, from the heart of darkness of colonialism to modern disasters and human dramas. This time it’s about Africa’s new life, brimming with economic and social developments. In spite of all sorts of strains, Africa today is widely perceived, besides being a main supplier of raw materials, as the next “future market” of the global economy. Having passed the “Asian decades” that marked the turn of the millennium, the African continent is the new boom. Incarnations of its economic potential are to be found across the entire continent, coming to represent the hope that this African boom may unlock. According to many researchers, in fact, major African cities such as Lagos, Kinshasa, and Dakar are expected to develop to their full potential, reaching more than 30 million inhabitants by 2050 and more than 80 million by 2100, ranking among the world’s top five megacities in terms of population! And, of course, this exerting a major impact on the future of the world. In other words, in 2018, for the first time in history, Africa is seen by many as a land of promise for the global future — and no longer a victim of colonialism. Africa thus becomes a key player in the transformation of the globalizing world. How then can we behold this challenge? Certainly, the most evident and even spectacular image of such a great leap, or paradigm shift, is urbanization. The African continent is going through an unprecedented process of urban expansion, a promising one not only in financial and technological terms, but above all in the prospect of a new social model, based on the notion of human community. We might ask ourselves whether a common desire for development (developmentalism) is embodied in the notion of a “common pursuit” of urbanization and metropolitanism? Or, more precisely, might a desire for metropolitanism be revealed? And if so, what kind of “physical forms” would it take on? What kind of city would it become? A generic one? A neo-liberal yet totalizing (totalitarian) city? How are post-colonial, neocolonial, and self-colonial conditions shaping the form of this desire for metropolitanism? Africa is a huge continent with great cultural diversities, and different histories and realities. The question is how to bring together those diverse “Africas” in “one city”: “Africa” does not exist, but “Africas” certainly do. This process is precisely what makes a metropolis a true capital. Emphasizing cultural and ethnic diversity, mixture, hybridity, creolization, is the core value of metropolitanism. How should an “African city” be? An “African City” is, thus, the new melting point or battle-field where geopolitical competitions take place today. The players being the West, the Chinese, and the others… and, essentially, “Africans” themselves. From this arena an urgent and relevant question arises. Is Africa, represented by the emerging megacities, the next biggest market? Or the next non-future? Being an artist, by definition, means raising questions about one’s presumed sense of “belonging”, one’s identity. Similarly, the questions that “Africa” itself, and, more specifically in our case, the “African city”, or the “metropolis” solicit. Artists from various origins and living elsewhere come together to form a new “heteropia”, a new metropolitan city, or to raise questions and testify to the making of a new “utopia”. Hence, African cities may be seen as a testing-ground for the future global city, and contemporary art takes on the role of a “visionary laboratory” where uniqueness rather than reproductiveness is championed. Drifting across the urban space and encountering all kinds of populations, artists resort to highly diverse languages, forms, and references, while highlighting the urban and global dimensions of their imaginations and commitments. They come up, simultaneously, with idealistic and critical visions of reality, and especially those pertaining to the future of “African cities.” In all this, what is the role of a “Western” institution? How much must one continue to decolonise the institution itself while intending to be “open” to the world? And, which world are we talking about? The next biggest market of global capitalism? Or a real laboratory for unknown things to happen? And, more significantly, are we still following the same colonial and neocolonial traditions? What is still to be invented? Are we still seeing “them” as the other? Or how much do we wish to become the other? Following the series focusing on the interaction between Europe and the Mediterranean regions, MAXXI “naturally” turns its attention to the contemporary art scene across the African continent, especially to the dynamics of migrating between both sides of the ocean with the engagements of artists travelling and living

on both sides. It’s about advancing the ideal of creating utopian cities within the architectural, institutional, and geopolitical realities specific to the MAXXI. Are we able to imagine, design, and test an ideal city for everyone? Will it be one more Tower of Babel? Will it be called “Africa” this time around? Are all the attempts condemned to end as “Junk spaces”? It is probably in the creation of urban junk, or junk urbanism, that all human tragicomedies are played out! A series of site-specific commissioned works become witnesses to this transformative process, and exemplify the efforts to face up to and answer challenging questions, both artistic and institutional. Youssef Limoud’s imposing slabs leaning one against the other create a “labyrinth” that is built and unbuilt and that the visitor may cross; Mimi Cherono Ng’ok’s photographs of everyday life turn into an emotional cartography; Amina Zoubir’s city is made up of a mul- tiplicity of gazes, bus passengers, the artist, the memory of a haunting past; Bili Bidjocka’s Time Tower, in a sort of monumentality, marks the coming of a different time; while Hassan Hajjaj’s site-specific installation will double as an artwork and a reading area, as well as an everyday life space in which one can enjoy the experience of living elsewhere at home… The making of such a temporary and utopian “African Metropolis” allows the MAXXI to examine, once again, its position in the rapidly mutating world. Are we ready?

AFRICAN METROPOLIS. An imaginary city BABEL by Simon Njami

I love cities. All cities. Asian, American, European, African, wherever they may be. I get drunk on cities. They take me meandering down their backstreets, amidst aromas you smell nowhere else. They free me from the dangerous certitudes of belonging by making me an outsider. In the no man’s land of every metropolis, I feel free, anonymous. Cities make people lower their masks, they take us back to a primal virginity, recalling us to ourselves and to our own centrality. But unlike the cities that we know and call “ours”, the Self to which a foreign city refers us is a vacuity that includes rather than excludes, inviting us to fill the “in-between” without which no meetings can ever occur. The cities that my mind recalls, in a series of slightly blurred black-and-white images, are places that I have reorganized, adapted to my memory’s needs. For what is an urban space if not the idea it calls to mind? The sensations and emotions it stirs in us? This exhibition aims to contribute to these constantly reactualized reflections. Our subject is not the physical space that delimits cities, of course, it is the mental space that turns them into potentiality. As you will have grasped, we will not be developing typologies of the Italian, Cameroonian or Japanese city here – we will instead approach the city as an in vivo experience. A process rather than an end. And if we do talk about construction, it will be to build utopian spaces, without concrete or tiles, metal or glass. The city we have tried to imagine is a universal concept. A space whose neighbourhoods are each their own world, their own imaginary country. “Dreamed lands” in contrast to “real lands”, to quote one of Édouard Glissant’s titles. Whenever I approach an unknown city, I always feel like an explorer from bygone days. My memory tries, unwittingly, to draw parallels and juxtapositions. But the attempt is often futile. The languages of cities are not interchangeable. Which is no doubt why, though all cities obey the same structural and political rationales, no two cities are ever alike. I have always dreamed of building a Babel, a nonplace that would bring together all the sounds, smells, and music of the world. For a city is first and foremost the men and women who live in it, who make it, and whose gaze (upon us) extracts us from the tourist’s inessentiality. My travels in Asia, the Americas, Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Europe, and Australia have taught me far more about myself than about the “elsewheres” they were supposed to represent. I saw and understood them through the person I was, the person who was changed in his relationship to the known world and to the other, which is always only a distorting mirror. It is in this sense that I am not interested in difference, as François Jullien puts it. What does interest me is the gap provoked by the exercise of “strangeness”. As I step into the other’s shoes, I know which “I” I am supposed to be: “While the tension generated by the gap engenders – produces – fecundity, I remind you that difference, conversely, produces nothing, save a definition. The same goes for cultures discovering each other in their respective fecundities as resources to be not only explored, but which each can make use of, regardless of where they initially belonged or their place of origin. For the gap is explored and used.”1 The city is thus a “gap”, because it is to be explored and made use of. The city we refer to today is a relatively recent phenomenon. Capitals have historically always been places where the nation came together from the provinces. The habits inherited from the countryside were transposed in this neutral territory, where each tried their best to create their reference points. People chose a neighbourhood in relation to their profession and often came from the same village. Medieval cities did not fill the same function; they did not cultivate a melting pot, on the contrary. The inhabitants were split into a sociological organization. The city represented a shelter against the dangers you faced on the highways and byways of the countryside. “Administratively one may, with Rathgen, doubt the existence of cities at all [in Japan]. In contrast to Japan, in China every city was surrounded with a gigantic ring of walls. However, it is also true that many economically rural localities which were not cities in the administrative sense, possessed walls at all times. In China such places were not the seat of state authorities. In many Mediterranean areas such as Sicily, a man living outside the urban walls as a rural worker and country resident is almost unknown. This is a product of century-long insecurity.”2 To my mind, the Japanese in Weber’s description were not an exception, but, rather, the rule. The city filled commercial and military functions, at a time when the notion of Nation did not exist. Cities were built as outposts, fortresses. You only need look at Ancient times to know it. In the Greek age you had the Athenians, then came the Romans. So it was very likely around these embryonic cities that the notion of “Nation” would be developed, when these autonomous “principalities” found themselves under the leadership of a centralised power. Italian unity, for example, only dates back to the early twentieth century. Weber’s comments about Asian and Western cities applied to African territories in the same way.

These cities that could be states found themselves inside walls that protected them from the outside world. Yet the arrival of the colonisers overturned this natural order. While casts had previously determined the geographical distribution of the population inside fortified walls, a new division would now take place, this time splitting populations into two categories: colonisers and natives, the latter being pushed beyond the city limits to outlying areas, reserved zones (just like American Indians were shut away in reserves), sometimes called “native districts”. What had once previously been a purely social enterprise was transformed into a racist one, the coloniser then wanted to reproduce the signs of his boundless power by remodelling the African “urban spaces” to fit his own desires. “The domestication of the African space by the colonial power happened in multiple ways: by a new ordering of ancient sites and territories; the construction of an imposing architecture; and, as Valentin Mudimbe noted, through a toponymy that served to ‘invent the place and its body’.3” This domestication was above all a policy of exclusion. Africans became strangers in their own lands and had to put up with a structuration that did not fulfil the natural order of their aspirations. The situation evolved with the independences in the 1960s, which saw the establishment of a permanent negotiation between the citizen and his or her environment. It became a matter of domesticating the other’s foreign body and making it one’s own. Perhaps this is where we should seek an explanation for the rhythm and the apparent cacophony of these cities. Despite the various elements that have been grafted onto them, they have still not quite been tamed by their users. Furthermore, in its contemporary practice, the city – the capital – is a monster in constant mutation: “Neighbourhoods pop up there like mushrooms, they flourish, then wilt. Then, carried off by the wind, they let themselves be scattered like the stamina’s spores.” 4 It’s a lovely image: the writer’s words have led me to picture all the neighbourhoods as pollen seeds scattered upon a wind that leads the city into a perpetual motion whose logic cannot be deciphered. Tierno Monénembo was evoking 1970s Abidjan, but this description fits most cities in Africa – as well as some other parts of the world – like a glove. Here, codes are invented along the way. As the wind blows. And the wind is what produces this hazardous but nonetheless functional syncretism. Because it is made of flesh and blood. It escapes the logic of a reasonable and operational world. Which explains the inevitable and necessary bastardisation of urban space. The colonial or metropolitan logic will be Creolised by its inhabitants. Modern cities have lost the passivity of their ancestors. They are no longer merely functional, like artificial creatures into whom new life has been breathed; they now respond to autonomous logics and rhythms which they themselves secrete. The city has become a living organism – like mountains, it obeys the geological principle of stratification. Cities are made up of a series of layers (avenues, buildings, monuments, etc.) representing markers of a history whose evolution is closely linked to that of the humans who are its users. They manifest contradictory signs that cannot be read by all in the same way: the city forges its own language, which it shares with its inhabitants, because this language participates in a common construction: “the city is a writing. He who moves about the city, e.g. the user of the city (which is what we all are), is a kind of reader who, following his obligations and his movements, appropriates fragments of the utterance in order to actualize them in secret.”5 Reading refers to books, or rather to writing, to use Roland Barthes’ term. Strolling through a city and its neighbourhoods is therefore like flicking through the pages of a book that we read as we please or according to the logic of the narrator – who we, the strollers, also happen to be. Because a city cannot be narrated. We live it. I only understood (or at least started to understand) Dakar, New York or São Paulo by going there. No story or guide could have told me what I would feel. If we claim that there is such a thing as community, an intimate relationship between the different countries of Africa (and why not the world), then it is most palpable in the structuring of their cities. I get lost in them. Even in Paris, which is nonetheless my “village”, in arrondissements I don’t know so well I sometimes discover streets or buildings that I had never noticed before. Getting lost, as Barthes says, is part of the game. It is the only way to tame the untameable. I see it as a feature of vitality and contemporaneity. Cities outside Europe are traversed by an exogenous history and are therefore still not fixed. They change every day, from one hour to the next, in rhythm with their populations and reappropriations. Their homogeneity contains its own contradiction in the management of – or daily dialogue with – their inhabitants. In this management, the town or city is the field of interaction for citizens whose only aim is to fluidify their interrelations and optimize the tools which the state makes available to them, the city-dwellers whose actions change its primary philosophy by adapting it to their communal life, in a structuration that is wrongly called informal. This informality that we rather too hastily assimilate to a spontaneous and illogical chaos is actually an endogenous and extremely complex form of organization.

A horizontal structure as opposed to the vertical structure engendered by public authorities. Ultimately, it is the people who decide how their city will develop. You only have to walk around Yopougon (Abidjan) or Deido (Douala), or cross certain streets in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris or in Trastevere in Rome, to see this metamorphosis taking place right before your eyes. The language of a city is both polysemy and symphony. Everywhere, the traffic noise, the places where people meet and exchange are peppered with voices and exclamations that give each city its own distinctive tone. Further, as Barthes writes, the city produces its own language: “The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it.” 6 The symbolic weight of the buildings, the social divisions underpinning political urban projects (Baron Haussmann’s grands boulevards), which Fritz Lang exacerbates in his film Metropolis, are suddenly subverted when appropriated by native populations. Metropolises speak the Creole tongues forged by their inhabitants – languages which, as George Bernard Shaw demonstrated (in his play Pygmalion, adapted for the screen by Hollywood as My Fair Lady) meant a person and their neighbourhood could be recognized simply by their language and the way it is spoken (the accent). This linguistic Creolisation can also be seen in the social design of neighbourhoods. If we forget geography for a while, this metalanguage is more or less the same as what we see being transposed from Africa to the capitals of Europe, providing we exclude the more bourgeois districts where sociological mixing occurs only accidentally (street vendors in tourist areas). Western capitals are archipelagos whose apparent unity does not erase their almost insular nature. Those who change them most spectacularly have roots within their walls going back several generations, even if statistics don’t always take the trouble to study their influence since, in the eyes of the administration, they are still foreigners. Evoking Raymond Queneau’s A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems7, Barthes reminds us of this essential truth: there is never one city, there are always cities. A multiplicity of possible combinations, and as with the cells of our brain, we use these infinities only in a very limited way, reducing them to fit the requirements of our private and professional lives. In New York, as I have observed, it is not uncommon for inhabitants of Manhattan to have never set foot in neighbourhoods that, for others, are vital hubs. How can realities that are contradictory and thoroughly complementary cohabit within the same urban space? You might suppose that the neighbourhoods of any city are structured in keeping with socio-economic divisions, but the mechanism at work in these cities-of-villages is far more subtle than such simple partitioning. There is a natural, organic porosity between their different worlds. And each person appears to be at home wherever he or she happens to be (with the few exceptions already noted), bonded with their fellows by the electric energy that we also find in works conceived by artists. But are they really the authors of their production? I wonder sometimes. Probably not, in fact. If it is fair to think that men con- struct their city, then I am also inclined to assert that the city, too, constructs its inhabitants. It is this organic aesthetic that I call social design. I love the ambiguities of this multilevelled expression. Let’s start with the term design, which, beyond its main aesthetic and functional meaning, can also refer to a plan or intention. When I use the word, I am not limiting myself to the manufactured object, but I am also referring to the organization of public space, of social cohabitation. The multiple meanings of design cast a singular light on the word social. This word “social” is to be understood in the sense of society, or community; connotations of charity and humanitarian work are to be avoided here. How do city-dwellers organise a parallel network of relations and interdependency? How do they redefine the city within its own frontiers and produce a cartography that meets needs other than those addressed by urban developers? We will place all these questions back in the context of our exhibition and take care to articulate them visually. But this exercise cannot be self-contained; to be effective, it must assume the form of a modelling tool, as though placing a piece of tracing paper over what exists, on the basis of which we would then define other lines of convergence facilitating the emergence of a better life. We plan to reshuffle the cards of a commonplace daily life and create a new way of managing the city that is effective both within and without, by instituting a dialogue with the populations of neighbouring districts. The Creolisation of the city concerns, precisely, the non-organised domain that often spills beyond the calibrated sphere of the public domain. It expresses the dynamic and contemporary part of the city, to which it gives its own distinctive rhythm. Thus, social design constitutes a hidden meshing, almost an act of resistance whereby the people determine the true function of tools conceived and put in place by deskbound technocrats poring over studies and surveys that purportedly reflect public opinion. This appropri- ation, undertaken by those who are its front-line consumers, is always right: it is activated by those who are its primary users, and this enables them to put in place the solutions they need to solve the problems of living together, and to do so

without middlemen. The gamble of this exhibition is to invent the city of all cities. A city that belongs to no-one but in which everyone can find their own personal references. Some will try to identify it as a certain city in Africa or Europe, when in reality we will be immersed in a fiction designed to bring out the essential and to immerse visitors in a different truth. A truth constituted by heterochronias, heterotopias, and heterologies. The African city that is a fantasy object for some does not exist; it is simply the metaphorisation of a more organic and vital question: how do we live together in spaces that seem insurmountably heterogeneous? If we look around us, there is no denying that the machine of commonality has broken down. Africa, of course, is the guiding thread of this narrative. But with the material that constitutes African cities we intend to convey the uniqueness of a polysemous experience. By getting visitors lost in a world that they would be incapable of claiming as totally theirs, we aim to get them to think differently about themselves and to imagine alterity in new terms. As Jacques Rancière points out: “art constructs real forms of community: communities between objects and images, between images and voices, between faces and words, that weave relations between pasts and a present, between faraway spaces and an exhibition space.”8 The museum, the place of exhibition par excellence, is also a city, an active heterotopia. It is structured like a city, with its alleys, its dead ends, its crossroads, its squares, its buildings (which, most of the time, are represented by rooms). The museum in itself already constitutes that strange destination that must be discovered and wandered around: that layer cake or, more precisely, those “hundred thousand billion poems” referred to by Barthes. Let us take the metaphor further by making tangible that which, up to now, was only latent. I have always been fascinated by labyrinths. The myth of Theseus, the possibility of the Minotaur. What might it represent for us today, that monster hidden away far from human eyes? From what dangers would that prodigious architect Daedalus seek to protect us in this world of ours? The only dangers are the dangers we create. Beyond the legend, there is the idea that, at the end of this “initiatory” process, there is something waiting to be found. Something that might not necessarily be tangible, like a “new form of community”, ties which, up to now, were imperceptible, a thread (like the one Ariadne gave Theseus). This thread that would enable us to read the particular map that is at the centre of any curatorial concept. After all, this proposition is not an exhibition, but an invitation to take a journey where each work could be seen as an island, a neighbourhood, a country whose structure can be understood only after we have lost ourselves there, like a wanderer borne along by the random logic of encounters.

1 “Si la tension générée par l’écart engendre – produit – une fécondité, la différence, je le rappelle par opposition, ne produit rien, si ce n’est une définition. Or, il en va de même des cultures se découvrant dans leurs fécondités respectives comme autant de ressources qui non seulement sont à explorer, mais aussi que chacun dès lors peut exploiter, et ce quels que soient son appartenance de départ et son lieu d’origine. Car l’écart s’explore et s’exploite.” F. Jullien, L’Écart et l’entre (Paris: Galilée, 2012), 37. (Translation for the catalogue by G. de Courcy-Ireland). 2 M. Weber, “The Nature of the City”, in Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 33. 3 “La domestication de l’espace africain par le pouvoir colonial s’inscrit de manières plurielles : par l’ordonnance nouvelle d’anciens sites et territoires, par la construction d’une architecture qui impose, et, comme l’a remarqué Valentin Mudimbe, à travers une toponymie qui sert à « l’invention du lieu et de son corps » .” J. Lagae, S. Boonen, Rencontres Picha. Biennale de Lubumbashi, exhibition catalogue, (Lubumbashi, 2010), Filigranes, Paris 2012, 40 (Translation for the catalogue by G. de Courcy-Ireland). 4 T. Monénembo, Un attiéké pour Elgass (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993). 5 “La ville est une écriture : celui qui se déplace dans la ville, c’est-à-dire l’usager de la ville (ce que nous sommes tous), est une sorte de lecteur qui, selon ses obligations et ses déplacements, prélève des fragments de l’énoncé pour les actualiser en secret.” R. Barthes, “Semiology and the Urban”, in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. N. Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 163. (Translation for the catalogue by G. de Courcy-Ireland). 6 “La cité est un discours, et ce discours est véritablement un langage : la ville parle à ses habitants, nous parlons notre ville, la ville où nous nous trouvons, simplement en l’habitant, en la parcourant, en la regardant.” Ibid., 160. (Translation for the catalogue by G. de Courcy-Ireland). 7 Translator’s note: Cent mille milliards de poèmes was the title of a book consisting of thick pages cut into strips on each of which was a line of verse. These freely moving strips could be permuted to form the seemingly infinite variety of poems evoked in the title. 8 “L’art construit des formes effectives de communauté : des communautés entre objets et images, entre images et voix, entre visages et paroles, qui tissent des rapports entre des passés et un présent, entre des espaces lointains et un lieu d’exposition.” J. Rancière, Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués (Paris: Amsterdam Editions, 2009) (Translation for the catalogue by G. de Courcy-Ireland).

AFRICAN METROPOLIS. An imaginary city IMAGINARY CITIES by Elena Motisi

African Metropolis. An Imaginary City is an opportunity to ponder the cultural scene of the African continent from the point of view of continuity with the research activity that MAXXI has been conducting for years concerning the Mediterranean region and the theme of the city. The aim of this exhibition project is to offer a place where cultural traditions, experiences, and future projections converse, thus breathing new life into ideas related to artistic output and socio-cultural issues. African Metropolis is a challenge to contemporary perception, not just of the African continent and its unique features, but of the contemporary Metropolis seen as a living organism that is constantly changing. This theme, analysed over the years by great thinkers like Edgar Allan Poe, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin, is a text that still needs to be deciphered, and here at MAXXI it is like the map of a journey with multiple destinations. It is indeed the goal of the project to place us before this matter: a complex system of hierarchies, restrictions, and relationships in which African art is just an alibi for us to be able to ask much bigger questions concerning the search for a balance between the need for change and the reference to that which in social life, as well as in urban transformation, represents the history of human evolution. African Metropolis deals with the theme of the city, leaving to the works themselves the power to present a place with a strong metropolitan spirit without, however, resorting to the use of tools of a scenographic nature for its installation. An urban skyline, drawn on the pattern of the balconies of the gallery where the exhibition is hosted, presents the works as though they were the buildings of an imaginary landscape characterized by the harmonious sequence of different languages. The architecture of the metropolis is defined here as a place of struggle for the new architecture, where it’s not the buildings that characterize the spaces, but rather, in line with Karl Scheffler’s idea,1 the human experience: the voices, presences, materials, and experiences are what determine the architecture of the city itself. It is thus a severe criticism of the disappearance of the archetypal city made up of buildings and structures: it is a space defined by the “Poetics itself of the city”,2 in which the places are revealed along with their immediacy to the subject crossing them. Wandering, Belonging, Recognizing, Imagining, and Reconstructing are the five chapters that describe the metropolitan actions visible in the city described for this exhibition. They also represent the incipit for a syncopated narrative that, in describing questions that remain open, discovers the references mentioned as the exhibition progresses. In this tale the metropolis is presented as a continent in a micro-scale, a territory where extremely varied traditions, religions, and languages cohabit, and where an imaginary axis defines the sense of the discovery inherent to the wandering in the streets where everyday actions and gestures. On display is a personal journey inside scenarios both historical and contemporary characterized by strong contrasts or assonances. These are universal places, the ones described by the images of Mimi Cherono Ng’ok, which represent a personal emotional map of the artist, absolute places, ones where James Webb asks us to fight against all forms of discrimination. The journey, the exodus, are the elements that constitute a new subjectivity, at times collective, at others individual, in which the “metropolitan animal” is the only one capable of understanding the differences that thrive in a single place defined by the density of images in Delirious New York,3 and described by Franck Abd- Bakar Fanny through images that are the fruit of nighttime walks in places characterized by only a veiled trace of human presence. In this “Wandering” the images by Akinbode Akinbiyi invite us to understand the rhythm of the city and its cacophony apparently devoid of spatial references. In the crucible of different cultural contexts, times, sounds, and contrasting voices characterising contemporary megalopolises, the city itself speaks to us in this exhibition through the work of Lucas Gabriel, who uses diverse idioms to accompany the visitor to different African places, while Amina Zoubir forcefully puts us before body language that is the result of the changes of our day and age. The metropolis is seen not as a place where there is a lack of communication, a place of social exclusion, but as a territory defined by multiple colours, traditional experiences and rituals that are part and parcel of the feeling of belonging that identifies a place or an individual. Andrew Tshabangu’s images describe this transition with a sentiment of familiarity as concerns these places steeped in faith, work, and leisure… The fabrics of tradition become a metaphor for cultural memory and at the same time an element of social critique in the works of Abdoulaye Konaté, just as the collages by Ouattara Watts force us come to terms with the cosmogony of our time, transcending the material nature of the object itself, however. By “Belonging” to this specific historical moment and analysing the transition

towards a post-Apartheid, steeped in complex contradictions and elements of continuity, we cannot help but deal with the theme of the diasporas and their restless manifestations. Metropolitan violence and its neuroses introduce themselves to the public via the small predators of Lavar Munroe, a metaphor for a desire for predominance and revolt; metropolitan melancholia, confident of a hope towards the consciousness of the individual, is revealed in the images of Antoine Tempé, while the never- ending movement that generates the life of the city in a world devoid of geographic and temporal references is presented in the chromatic combinations of Joël Andrianomearisoa. The African continent, with its polysemic experience bursting with contradictory elements, is the soul of this narrative, and it is precisely starting from the material that makes up African cities that this expository tale wants the visitor to grasp the uniqueness of this reality. Recognizing oneself in this heterogeneousness is one of the goals of African Metropolis: indeed, we wonder how it is possible to live in a community that is so varied, and in spaces determined by multiple linguistic codes that at the same time preserve their identity. Through images linked to African urbanization, Sammy Baloji focuses on post-colonial identities; Godfried Donkor examines the visual imaginary associated with the myth portraying men going about their everyday lives; Simon Gush studies the relationship that links work ethics and subjectivity, exploring work environments in contemporary society and in history. A multitude of subjectivity foreshadows urban scenarios and communities in progress: the “small humanity” of Abdulrazaq Awofeso, seen as a contemporary urban tribe in which the use of African costumes reveals the inability to unveil who is hiding behind these accessories, ceaselessly harks back to the pathway in the gallery, to then reassemble in an imaginary social action, “Recognizing” oneself in a process of personal growth that advances at the same pace as that of the city, one is inevitably tormented by one’s own story. It is reminiscent of a novel by G.W. Sebald4 in which the linguistic expressions have complexities equal to a city with mazes and historical references in which it not always easy to recognize oneself. Nicholas Hlobo queries the process of renewal through the traditional act of sewing. Hassan Musa uses fabrics printed and then sewn together to allude to traditional Western symbols and create contemporary images. El Anatsui finds a bridge between past and present by manipulating the consequences of ecological and cultural destruction. Akin to the contemporary city, the result of tradition, but devoid of the reassuring rules of the classical polis, we seek to come to terms with chaotic imaginaries and places of apparent disenchantment. Hence, far- removed from Hugh Ferriss’ idea of a utopian city,5 the representation of an expressionistic and imposing city, this exhibition does not define a physical space, but rather a mental one that, brimming with imagination, overlaps times and places, realities and dreamlike landscapes. Here, the work of Kiluanji Kia Henda shapes history by photography, installation, and sculpture, breathing life into ideal narratives situated in timeless contexts and coming to terms with the colonial past of the African continent, but at the same time challenging the concepts of identity and modernity. Sarah Waiswa instead, between imagination and reality, blurs the boundaries between public and performative in her highly poetic images. No longer functionalist metropolises with pre-determined rhythms, but places governed by layers of buildings and more or less real-life experiences, characterised by great emotional tension described by Délio Jasse through urban images in which the inhabitants embody the changes and the social composition. On the one hand, performative micro-interventions are recounted in the images of Samson Kambalu, inspired by traditional ritual practices; on the other, acts of appropriation of the urban place are presented to the visitor via Onyis Martin’s language of juxtaposition, which explores contemporary urban spaces, and sets us before the subliminal power of the images. The urban context that is constantly evolving gathers a dreamlike imaginary of female figures dressed in recycled fabric turned into modern attire that is the result of the ecological awareness of Lamine Badian Kouyaté. In “Imagining”, a possible scenario that garners new contemporary schemes of social behaviour that are far-removed from the tribal primitivism and from Western preconceptions, Paul Onditi tries to decipher the dynamics of our times by coming to terms with the economic and political disarray that distinguishes it. By taking our distance from the conventional portrait of the African continent, we decided to present the metropolis as a place of development defined by the never-ending reconstruction that is the result of different pasts and different policies and everyday actions and gestures catalyzed by the site-specific work of Hassan Hajjaj. Our idea is to place the visitor before the rapid growth of and the change in the African and worldwide megalopolises where, suspended, is the visual richness of Pascale Marthine Tayou’s work, who shows us a world hovering between past and future experiences. With a critical eye, Heba Y. Amin accounts for the effects of a corrupt dictatorship; François-Xavier Gbré wishes to underscore the economic and demographic growth that generates the birth of megalopolises while the trepidations on the financial speculation and its consequences are tangible in the work of Meschac Gaba. The reconstruction must indeed also come to terms with the social and existential fragmentation of the metropolises, with a labyrinth of behaviours and existences

captured by PEFURA in his search for elements that are inspired by the African traditional culture revived in the serial repetitions of a possible modern urban design. The presentation of a maze-like version of the city is entrusted to the site-specific work of Youssef Limoud, who challenges the visitor with a system hovering between order and chaos, structure and ruin, fragility and reality; Youssef Limoud’s work converses with that of Bili Bidjocka which presents itself as a beacon of possibilities, an element recalling times and places in the making. Through its refined methodologies and voices, the modern megalopolis, and in particular the African one, defines its inhabitants in a bi-univocal relationship in which humans, in turn, build their own cities. “Reconstructing” cities that are distant from the idea of monumentality by now lost, and so well described by G. C. Argan,6 this exhibition wishes to place us before issues relative to the policies of development and to the possible governing strategies of a country that includes over fifty countries, thousands of cities, and millions of inhabitants with different climatic zones, political experiences, cultures, religions, and languages, and for which it is impossible to identify a univocal strategy. Hence, this project does not explore the metropolis as a land of typologies, but rather analyses it as a universal idea: it is at once the people that experience it and the matrix of its inhabitants, it is a space made up of thoughts and experiences that take turns in a system of symbols and images. In this complex city, where inevitably what emerges are the intimate relationships between the different African countries and communities, one has to get lost with the awareness of being amidst the roads of a “world capital”: it is a xenopóleis in which the inhabitant modifies and is at the same time modified by the surrounding environment, in a polysemic ebbing and flowing process.

1 K. Scheffler, Die Architektur der Großstadt (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1913). 2 P. Sansot, Poétique de la ville (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973). 3 R. Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978). 4 G.W. Sebald, Austerlitz (Milan: Adelphi, 2002). 5 H. Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (New York: Ives Washburn, 1929). 6 G. C. Argan, L’Europa delle capitali 1600–1700 (Milan: Skira, 1964).