Women on Aeroplanes by Annett Busch

Women on Aeroplanes—agency for flying ideas is an artistic research project, based on a framework and network that is necessarily constantly evolving and changing. it aims to gain a broader understanding of what independence and interdependence means. Looking closely at the long history of transatlantic networks and the struggles for liberation, predating the process of independence on the African continent (and elsewhere), the project explores how women were always central to such networks and struggles, in which they played multiple roles. Their stories are however hardly told and their faces remain widely invisible. We aim to not only frame their various and heterogeneous contributions, politically and artistically, but also create new parameters and premises of narratives. To recall the notion of independence today necessarily means to address the gap between formal independence and a process of decolonisation that was simultaneously national and intranational, transnational and international and which remains, in many ways, incomplete. The project's title is borrowed loosely from Kojo Laing's critically acclaimed second novel Woman of the Aeroplanes, written in 1988. With its deconstructive syntax and implosion of genres, the novel sets the tone for a historical narrative, in which subordinate subject-object relations are negated. Laing’s method of speculative fiction writing can be seen as a making-of-theory using other means. As a reference point, it opens a pathway to a new grammar that makes re-visiting and re-writing history possible.

My life is a collage, with time cutting and arranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting, sometimes with the fresh shock of a surrealist painting, wrote Eileen Agar, photographer and painter, associated with the Surrealist movement who, like Colette Omogbai, attended the Slade School of Fine Art—almost exactly 40 years earlier, between 1925 and 1926. The repetition of a certain phrasing in connection with Colette Omogbai, a pioneering Nigerian painter, “who identified as a Surrealist,” sent us looking into histories of surrealisms. The plural here is important, because there are indeed many invocations and occupations of the surrealist movement, into various geographies, subject to (mis-)interpretation. Here, trying to arrange encounters between people, dates, poems, moods, ambitions, images—that never met, but maybe did— became a sort of spiral of conversations amid cracks, breaches, and intervals, interstices and discontinuities, allowing the in-between to vibrate in negotiations.

# 3 In Conversation

Contributions by Colette Omogbai, Nadine Siegert, Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, Michael C. Vazquez, Odun Orimolade, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Gladys Melina Kalichini, Rahima Gambo, Lungiswa Gqunta, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Emily Pethick, Bisi Silva.

Edited by Annett Busch & Marie-Hélène Gutberlet

Copy editing Michael C.Vazquez

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