ABOUT THE
PROJECT
EXPLORING YOUTH-LED CREATIVE ACTIVISM, RESISTANCE, AND CITIZENSHIP ‘FROM BELOW’ ACROSS KENYA, MALAWI, AND ZIMBABWE.
4 cities
• Nairobi (Kenya)
• Harare (Zimbabwe)
• Blantyre (Malawi)
• Lilongwe (Malawi)
16
ARTISTS & COLLECTIVES
THE CONTEXT: CRISIS AND CREATIVE RESISTANCE
Young people across Africa continue to weather interminable economic shocks, housing crises, bouts of state repression, police brutality, privatisation, corruption, environmental decline, spiralling inequality, defunded health infrastructures, and fiscal austerity. In response, many cities on the continent have witnessed a resurgence of popular youth-led activism against this ongoing multi-crisis.
While many governments have often attempted to shrink spaces for political participation, community activism, rights defenders, dissent, and collective action of any kind, there has been a parallel rise in creative forms of protest to circumvent, outsmart, and resist these periodic government crackdowns. A whole range of artistic interventions into public life have emerged as a result.
Through art, young Africans have been able to stake visible (and audible) claims to urban spaces, belonging, social justice, citizenship, and have thus forged a dizzying multitude of intersecting ‘territories of operation’ (AbdouMaliq Simone 2022) through which the irrepressible nature of shared inhabitation, cityness, and defiance is being perpetually reinvented and rearticulated.
THE CONCEPT: FORGING CITYNESS FROM BELOW
‘Forging Urban Citizenship’ is a collaborative art and research project that brings together sixteen independent artists and/or artist collectives from four cities across Kenya, Malawi, and Zimbabwe to think about what it means to continuously ‘forge’ the urban lifeforms, care, and justice that many Gen-Z demand on the streets. Participating artists in Nairobi, Harare, Blantyre, and Lilongwe show that such creative forms of activism are in the process of reshaping civic urban cultures ‘from below’ across the continent and opening new avenues for lasting social change.
The project engages with a multiplicity of art forms, materials, genres, and techniques, mirroring an ever-growing panoply of urban life projects, spaces, politics, and practices. Cities in Africa and beyond have become social laboratories and workshops where new ways of belonging, caring, building, sounding, and enacting community are invented, tested, revised, and constantly brought into conversation with one another.
In this sense, ‘forging’ in the exhibition title speaks to a process of perpetually reassembling connections and solidarities, welding together divergent life trajectories, but also rearranging social relations, movements, mobilities, and political structures in creative and sometimes surprising ways.
Urban citizenship thus emerges as a permanent work-in-progress, an unfinished (and unfinishable) work of art under construction and open to new impulses from the dreams, hopes, refusals, protests, and resistances of urban dwellers, as lifesmiths, who use art to reshape and make the city in their own image.
