New Issue of static: Cultural Infrastructures in Africa
How are dominant narratives about Africa produced, archived and challenged? The new special issue Cultural Infrastructures in Africa, edited by Andrea Kifyasi and Gideon Morrison, appears in the gd:c bulletin static and explores these questions through the lens of disconnectivity.
Against persistent Afro-pessimist narratives and long-standing Western representations of the continent, the issue approaches Africa not as disconnected from global processes, but as a space shaped by complex entanglements — marked simultaneously by connection, exclusion, integration, and erasure.
The contributions investigate: • archival silences and colonial knowledge production • museums, restitution, and contested cultural heritage • festivals as alternative cultural archives and sites of postcolonial imagination • contemporary cultural infrastructures and their political, economic, and social challenges
The issue brings together research originating from the workshop Archiving dis cultural heritage(s) in Africa at global dis and highlights how cultural infrastructure structures memory, visibility, and participation in global knowledge production.
Read the digital issue of static here: https://static.ub.uni-muenchen.de/index.php/static Continue Reading
Anchored in the research agenda of the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, a new publication explores the transnational art history of production, transport, and logistics, focusing on the often invisible infrastructures that shape how art is made, circulated, and exhibited across the world.
The edited volume Nomadic Camera: Photography, Displacement and Dis:connectivities has been published. It emerged from the ‘Nomadic Camera’ workshop on 14–15 June 2023 at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The book brings together contributions from history, media studies, art, art history, and ethnology.
Edited by Burcu Dogramaci, Winfried Gerling, Jens Jäger, and Birgit Mersmann, the volume explores the “nomadic camera” as a mobile medium in the context of migration, flight, and displacement. The contributions examine technical, medial, and aesthetic practices, narratives of movement, as well as questions of archiving, circulation, and memory – opening new perspectives on photography as a medium of mobility.
Many alumni of the research centre contributed to the volume, which was funded by the Open Access Monograph Fund of the State of Brandenburg.
