Symposium Beyonding Urbanity
On 26 October 2022 the Creative Industries Fund NL and the Prince Claus Fund organize the symposium Beyonding Urbanity, where the participants of the Mentorship Building Beyond, together with students of Sandberg's Blacker Blackness programme will reimagine the future of cities.
Date: 26 October 2022
Time: 12.30pm - 6.30pm
Location: Rijksakademie, Sarphatistraat 470
Free entrance: Please register for attending the live event or watch on vimeo.
Main language: English
African cities are the fastest urbanising spaces in the world. They host the youngest populations and are sites of new financial channels, ecologies, and spaces. We see these conditions as forms of futurity, where further reinscriptions of Africa as a global capital take place. By extension, reconstitutions of Urbanity. However, in this context a young population of Africans embodies the future as present.
Beyonding Urbanity is a two-part symposium bringing together different perspectives, practices, and forms of expression of artists, designers, architects, and researchers from Egypt, Rwanda, Nigeria, Algeria, South Africa, Ethiopia, Uganda, and the African diasporas. Through conversation they will create a constellation of remembrances, entanglements, concerns, pauses, prompts and offerings of imagination that are centered in cultivating a symbiotic relation to different forms of expression that reconstitute urbanity. In two panels, the participants reflect on the human and non-human ecologies that are 'vital' to the process of erecting buildings, and to organising, designing, resisting, and growing our cities.
This symposium brings together the participants of the Building Beyond Mentorship Programme with the students from the Blacker Blackness Programme at the Sandberg Instituut. Building Beyond is an alternative educational programme that invites 12 creatives from the African continent to reimage the future of African cities through design and creative problem solving. We invite you to join the ongoing conversation on how creative practices rooted in locality and community can lead to new perspectives and promote transformative urban agendas that change how we inhabit our world.
12.15 Doors open
12.30 – 12.45 Intro
12.45 – 1.15 Keynote by Jeanne van Heeswijk
1.30 – 5.30 Panels
5.30 – 6.30 Drinks
This collaboration was initiated by current Rijksakademie resident Ola Hassanain, who will also be moderating the panels.
Curatorial: Ola Hassanain
Conceptual development: Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk
