UNRAVELING THE (UNDER-)
DEVELOPMENT COMPLEX
OR
TOWARDS A POST- (UNDER-)
DEVELOPMENT INTERDEPENDENCE 

AN ODE TO WALTER RODNEY’S “HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA” 50 YEARS ON
(1972–2022)

Development in human society is a many-sided process. At the level of the individual, it implies increased skill and capacity, greater freedom, creativity, self-discipline, responsibility and material well-being. Some of these are virtually moral categories and are difficult to evaluate – depending as they do on the age in which one lives, one’s class origins, and one’s personal code of what is right and what is wrong. (…) The relations which develop within any given social group are crucial to an understanding of the society as a whole: Freedom, responsibility, skill, etc. have real meaning only in terms of the relations of men in society.

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

The research, exhibition, performance and discursive project UNRAVELING THE (UNDER-) DEVELOPMENT COMPLEX takes its cue from, and celebrates Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, while asking the question: How can we imagine a Post-(Under)development world? This project is a daring effort to analyse the status quo and imagine a world that does not exist in the binary of “development” and “underdevelopment” and  explore the possible shifts from structures of ‘’hierarchical dependence’’ towards those of ‘’balanced interdependence’’. Following a theoretical research phase, the exhibition traversed across performative modalities through various artistic practices that poetically engage in a transtemporal dialogue making visible the complex entanglements and contradictions embedded in these systems by highlighting the ruptures that simultaneously serve as generative spaces for new imaginaries to emerge.

Proceeding forward in this journey with the INVOCATIONS program, the aim is to expand upon the learnings from the exhibition, challenging and addressing historical, economic, infrastructural and global frameworks that reinforce these systems of oppressive dependency. These two days will be accompanied by activists, sonic agitators, scholars, ecofeminists, poets, political economists, policy advocates and practitioners who will engage in discursive formats to delve deeper into the resistance and perseverance that allows imaginaries to exist and emerge across geographies, while celebrating Walter Rodney’s legacy. The INVOCATIONS program is an attempt to share knowledge across languages, and through performance and sonority to imagine and shape together a post developmental age towards transformative conviviality.