African Mobilities explores an architectural response to the complexities of migration and the circulation of people, ideas, resources and aesthetics – both in physical space and in spaces of the imagination.

African Mobilities – this is not a refugee camp exhibition returns to Lagos following Lagos Exchange – the collaborative workshops held in Lagos in 2017 to re-present the part of the  Architecture exhibition held in Munich (April – August 2018). The exhibition explores how architecture responds to the complexities of migration and the circulation of people, ideas, resources and aesthetics – both in the physical space and in the space of the imagination. The exhibition examines the possibilities for creative interventions that emerge when one applies a relational, multi-scalar and multi-sited approach to this exploded space-time, in which the majority of migration and circulations occur on the African continent.

This iteration of the exhibition features Mad Horse City, a collaboration that was conceived between New York-based artist and architect Olalekan Jeyifous and Lagosian writer Wale Lawal during the African Mobilities workshop series under the title of Lagos Exchange (2017).

Jeyifous’ earlier work Shantytown Megastructure considered how ‘slums’ are often viewed as eyesores to be bulldozed, which frequently leaves inhabitants displaced. As an alternative, it reimagined a future for the city of Lagos where the dispossessed are given prominence through a heterotopian and ‘solar-punk’ vision that acknowledges the resilient practices of reuse and sustainability, as well as the highly self-organised nature of these communities. The project exhibited explores the interiority of these imagined communities in an interactive 360-degree virtual reality installation, graphic novella and 3 animated short films.

The African Mobilities traveling the African continent in 2019, 2020 and 2021, is made possible through support of the Goethe-Institut and the School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand.

African Mobilities- this is not a refugee camp exhibition, was developed in collaboration between Architekturmuseum der TUM, Munich, and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, held at the Architekturmuseum der TUM, April 26 – August 19, 2018. The original initiative was funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and developed in partnership with the Goethe-Institut.

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