HUMA Book Launch

Author: Huda Tayob (University of Manchester, UK) 

Introduction: Archive of Forgetfulness is a catalogue of the pan-African digital exhibition and podcast series which ran from September 2020 and December 2021 at archiveofforgetfulness.com. The publication acts as a physical translation of the collection of work online, and opens up wider questions around archives, memory and forgetfulness. The project includes the work of fifty-six artists, cultural producers, curators, creative thinkers and researchers from the African continent and diaspora, including Angola, Brazil, Canada, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, France, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, USA, the United Kingdom and Zanzibar. 

The catalogue speaks to the four parts of the larger collaborative project namely an eight-part podcast series, twenty-two artworks submitted in response to an open call, five essays and six regionally curated projects. The publication is both a physical translation of the online work and a moment to reflect on questions the wider project raises around archival labour, memory and forgetfulness. Drawing inspiration from Mahmoud Darwish’s prose length poem, Memory for Forgetfulness (1987), the works center questions of mobility and infrastructure to collectively question how we might engage with what exists in the failure of memory. Throughout the project is an engagement with the coloniality of borders and boundaries - both disciplinary and geographic – alongside narrations of crossing, conversations of mobility, and speculative acts of dreaming through image, text, voice and film.

See the book: Archive of Forgetfulness (Jacana Media, 2023)

Open access: archiveofforgetfulness.com

About the author:
Huda Tayob is an architectural theorist with an interest in minor, migrant and subaltern architectures. She is co-curator of the open access curriculum Racespacearchitecture.org.

Discussant: Bongani Kona (University of the Western Cape) 

Bongani Kona is a writer, editor and lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape. His work has appeared in a variety of places including Chimurenga, The Baffler and BBC Radio and he is the editor of Our Ghosts were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying.

More about the HUMA Book Lunch Series

Lunch will be served at 12:30 SAST (GMT+2).

Register to attend: send us an email at huma@uct.ac.za

Attending online? Register to join via Zoom: https://uct-za.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUkf-GtqTkuG9xk6exIganur-ANKmCqnGTS

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