#InoperableRelations - AbdouMaliq Simone in conversation with Mpho Matsipa

Circulation has played a foundational role in hegemonic understandings of global capitalism that basically function as cartographies of empire that map out uneven and differential mobilities. This podcast is the keynote episode of the Volume on Circulation and Cartographies and explores how freedom remains a scarce and unequally distributed commodity – and how the freedom to move is increasingly becoming the principal stratifier in the longue durée of modernity, coloniality and neo-liberal capitalism in many of our cities. The Volume also seeks to destabilize Global North preoccupations with the spectacle of black death as the principle signifier of African mobility as well as the preoccupation with the large numbers of people from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe moving to the centers of global capital. Rather, African Mobilities examines the possibilities for creative intervention, strategies of interruption, obstructions, gaps, pauses and logistical counterpoints that contest racial enclosure and strive for a more relational, multi-scalar and multi-sited approach to this contemporary experience of exploded space-time, in which the majority of circulation occurs on the African continent. These ongoing conversations constitute provisional cartographies of power and desire, raising a number of important questions about which narratives Africans choose to tell, how we tell them, and how so much of our ‘knowledge’ about African cities and architecture is circumscribed by a range of political interests rooted in hegemonic colonial discourses. A podcast companion to the architecture exhibition, this Volume is a counter-cartography of hegemonic social-spatial relations and representational practices, and begins the work of producing new, alternative practices, knowledges and subjects through a diverse range of spatial practices in the service of a larger emancipatory spatial project in Africa, and beyond. ___________________________________________________________ The #AfricanMobilities podcast series was made possible by Goethe-Institut Johannesburg in partnership with the Wits University - School of Architecture and Planning, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, Architekturmuseum de Tum and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation #AfricanMobilities #Circulations #InoperableRelations #XazaarAdjame