The artistic research project Electronic Textures, realised at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art/NTNU (2016-2018), reads, revisits, curates concepts of history through an encounter with pan-African, tricontinental magazines published from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s. These periodicals evince a certain immediacy in look and outlook in their quest for a new type of language and aesthetics, as well as politics. Indexing authors, editors, and designers with publishing information gives rise to other narratives—making visible an array of collaborative international networks, as well as the power relationships and shifting fronts that underwrote cultural production during the Cold War.
In collaboration with with Ayodele Arigbabu, John Akomfrah (JA), Filipa Cesar, Jihan El-Tahri (JET), Kodwo Eshun (KE), Nida Ghouse (NG), Laura Horelli (LH), Christopher Wessel (CW) and Ahmed Al-Nawas, Ibrahima Wane (IW), Michael C. Vazquez (MV) and more to come. Project management, curation, display, editor Annett Busch (AB).
Ronald Segal: In Sight of the End
"In White South Africa, faith in the indivisibility of Freedom is the cardinal heresy, a blaspheming of the Colour Bar in whose image the State has been raised. For South Africans there has always existed an `apartheid' in Freedom, and the Whites have condoned and. encouraged the division persistently, in a desparate faith of their own that the more freedom they took away from others, the more they would have to themselves.
But inevitably, quite the opposite of what they have believed and planned has happened . Because Freedom is, finally, indivisible, the freedoms they would have safeguarded and, increased. by their denial of them to others--freedom of belief and its public expression, freedom of movement and association, freedom of government election, and, above all, freedom from fear----they have denied to themselves...."
On the 9th of August 1956, together with Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophia Theresa Williams de Bruyn, Lillian Ngoyi led the women's anti-pass march to the Union Buildings in Pretoria, one of the largest demonstrations staged in South African history. Holding thousands of petitions in one hand, Ngoyi was the one who knocked on Prime Minister Strijdom’s door to hand over the petitions
Independence Dates
December 24, 1951, Lybia
January 1, 1956, Sudan
March 2, 1956, Morocco
October 2, 1958, Guinea
March, 20 1956, Tunisia
March 6, 1957, Ghana
"Tashkent 1958. I try and imagine it for a moment.The first conference of the Afro-Asian Writers is in session. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the poet representing Pakistan, is there. I find archival images on the internet: W. E. B. Du Bois lecturing into a bunch of microphones, meeting with the Nigerian delegation, chatting with the Chinese, raising his arms in affirmation with others."
Nida Ghouse, "Lotus Notes" in: After Year Zero—Geographies of Collaboration, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2015
1959 Founding of the publishing house: Les Éditions Maspero.
Entretien avec Francois Maspero
Interview with Francois Maspero
Chris Marker: Les mots ont un sense (1970)
I am in Cairo. History is impossible.The year is 2012. A friend and I are walking in midsummer heat against midday traffic along Qasr al-Aini—the road on which I came to live in early 2007. We’ve both been away a while and don’t quite know what to make of the man climbing, somewhat impishly, over to the graffitied side of the army wall on the corner of Sheikh Rehan Street. We’re looking for Dar al-Odaba. Number 104. If we were to be approaching the other way, with the cars, from Mounira or Garden City, coming towardTahrir, we’d find it on our left, right after Barclays, or so I’ve been told. That is to say I used to pass the place, oblivious of it, back and forth, on my route, almost every other day.
By then, 1965, Colette Omogbai was already in London, living in Islington, studying at the Slade, where Ibrahim Salahi had studied a decade earlier, where the Guyanese polymath Denis Williams had taught before abandoning a bright career as one of Britain’s leading black artists to research culture and art in Africa. All three of them were involved in the Mbari Club for Artists and Writers in Ibadan, Nigeria. Ulli Beier, Mbari’s co-founder and animateur, had met Salahi in Khartoum early in 1961 and came away convinced that the unknown Sudanese painter was Africa’s greatest living artist. Salahi’s first major exhibition was one of the club’s inaugural events, and the occasion for one of its first publications. Omogbai’s August 1963 debut seemed equally auspicious. Beier sent photographs of her paintings to the leadership of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) in Paris, including K. A. Jelenski, proudly announcing the arrival of “a new Mbari artist.”.
Michael C. Vazquez, What is Surrealism? Reading Agony with Tchicaya O' Tamsi, in: Women on Aeroplanes—Inflight Magazine No3, In Conversation.
Independence Dates
Januar 1, 1960, Cameroon
April 4, 1960, Senegal
April 27, 1960, Togo
June 26, 1960, Madagaskar
June 30, 1960, Congo
July 1, 1960, Somalia
August 1, 1960, Benin
August 5, 1960, Burkina Faso
August 7, 1960, Ivory Coast
August 11, 1960, Chad
August 17, 1960, Gabon
September 22, 1960, Mali
October 1, 1960, Nigeria
November 28, 1960, Mauritania
April 27, 1961, Sierra Leone
December 9, 1961, Tanganyika
Bongani Madondo: Diggin’ or (Yes, Mr.Neogy, Magazines Do Culture... Sometimes) in: After Year Zero—Geographies of Collaboration, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2015
Kodwo Eshun: What does independence feel like at a distance? What are the connections replayed and transmitted at a distance? And how can a magazine render the epic event of inauguration—understood as a simultaneity of sensorial states.
Transition magazine was founded in Kampala, Uganda in 1961 by editor: Rajat Neogy. Associate Editors: Francis Kasura, Don Mann, Ganesh Bagchi. Cover and Artwork: Helen Calogeropoulos.
Annotations in Transition with
Michael C.Vazquez & Kodwo Eshun, Frankfurt/Main 2019
On the picture: Rajat Neogy (right) with Wole Soyinka.
Cannibal Logic an interview with Michael C.Vazquez by Carina del Valle Schorske, in Transition 106, 2011.
John Akomfrah: The cover is interesting. As you read that poem from the first issue, I was thinking it’s possible to move beyond a sort of for and against thing… If we recognize it as something like an encrypted ontology, Transition as a Gutenbergian body if you will. There’s a way in which Neogy announces the beginnings of the journal—it launches itself almost as if it is a new body which will be about the trying to gather other new bodies, a violent eruption of body in knowledge.
And the cover is so interesting for that because it says, in the effort to create this body we will do several things by heeding several things at the same time. One of which might be vanguardism. We might have a proximity to vanguardism via modernism. This looks exactly like an opening magazine, the opening edition of the new left review which looks like every other magazine. So you have this relationship to vanguardism but the proximity would be qualified. We would use, let’s say Mondrian-like geometry but just undercut it with a little of organicism, you know, so that the front may look like it’s Mondrian but actually it’s designed by Helen Calogeropoulos.
And in the process of trying to give life to this body, there will quite literally be other forms of proximity. I actually think Okigbo is more Pound than he is any other figure because the opening poem looks like The Cantos. It’s called The Limits, but it looks like The Cantos. It even has a number root, roman numerals, I-IV. And interestingly it’s called Siren. So this question of the siren call will also define what the measure, that proximity will be—it will be close, but not close enough to be fully a state. We will be close to vanguardism of the leftist variety but we will not be that. You know. We will be close to the history of modernism but not quite because we have other things in mind, we will be close to the founding texts of modernism…. but inserted between us and then something called Africanism, you know, that’s about to inaugurate itself. And in that sense, the question of mission is not accidental or coincidental. The fact that you will not find C.L.R. James or a diatribe on Nkrumah except as a kind of criticlater on in 1966 and frankly we wouldn’t see Fanon or any of the others sort of inaugurated figures of the discourse on Africanism — is logical, consistent and absolutely legitimate in my view. It says I am a new body and I have to be taken seriously in my own terms. So let’s do that. Let’s take it very very seriously for what it is, which is new formative ontology which enacts itself very differently to all projects, but …
Independence Dates
July 1, 1962, Burundi
July 1, 1962, Rwanda
July 5, 1962, Algeria
October 9, 1962, Uganda
December 10, 1963, Zanzibar
December 12, 1962, Kenya
Kodwo Eshun: And these green and black bars and the single yellow bar are elements for a national flag, a flag that is under construction. These are elements from an Africa that is in a state of assemblage. So the cover displays the political colours of the commonwealth of Tanganyika which is not yet a Republic. Tanzania is three years in the future.
"...the storylines about their editors, their specific in-betweenness, and what this position might produce. Imagine the editor being a collaborator, a facilitator, an orchestrating driving force whose labor shapes but disappears in the work of others, hardly traceable in the end."
So on the inside front cover, on that top right hand corner is a poem that celebrated the first of the new nation. It is a poem that is anonymous and because it’s anonymous it’s likely that it was written by Rajat Neogy, the editor who was a poet. So I’m just going to read out that poem in that top corner. So it says:
“Birth is created out of stillness. The movement of creation is a moment of violent harmony, of thundering colours, of severed sounds, broken cages, of sour blood warming into sweeter honey, of crushed ant hills and torn skies, riding precariously on the strangulating waterfall, damned with an eternal sadness. And then the wisp of passing shadow brings a levelled stillness an even rippling, and finally a blue mirror descends and settles over the surface like a postage stamp. It is thus that life begins. Tanganyika is born. It is now all true activity will begin.”
"Ronald Segal, editor and founder of Africa South, is a son of a prominent Cape Townian Jewish garment family who is or was a Trotskyist, although I’m not sure precisely what sort. ... He starts Africa South in 1956 and he wants it to be capacious. He’s like, “There is no place where people are talking to each other, or arguing with each other,” and so he wants it to represent all of the factions that are in play at the time."
Something within the word “capacious” propelled the idea of turning the magazine into an image, a collage—an interface, a tool. Names. To see all those who made the crowd at once. Author credits, lists of contributors, to remember the many, many who are new for me, but known to others. Memory cards generating algorithms as entry points for research that lead to obituaries in the Guardian but also finally to different networks, positions, communities, languages. It became a different way to read the magazines. The notion of capaciousness also hinted that the history of liberals and liberalism in South Africa might be more complex than I imagined—mainly what you called the radicalizing over the course of the 1950s, fighting the more complacent elements in the Liberal Party itself.