
AN ODE TO WALTER RODNEY’S “HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA” 50 YEARS ON
(1972–2022)
RESEARCH, EXHIBITION & PERFORMANCE PROJECT
2022–2023
Chapters / Invocations / ACTIVATIONS
March–April 2022 Bandjoun Station Bandjoun / Cameroon
June/July 2022 African Heritage Center Nairobi / Kenya
July 2022 Goethe Institut Abidjan / Côte d'Ivoire
22.–24.07.2022 TTTAWLAND Moita / Portugal
January 2023 Goethe Institut Johannesburg / South Africa
EXHIBITION
November 2022–January 2023 SAVVY Contemporary Berlin / Germany
The project 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) takes its cue from and celebrates Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa fifty years after its publication, while asking the question: How can we imagine a Post-(under)development World?
By relating Rodney’s seminal work to the dependency theorists, as much as to the post-development advocates like Ivan Illich, Gustavo Esteva, Wolfgang Sachs, Arturo Escobar or Majid Rahnema, to the struggles of ecofeminists of degrowth like Maria Mies, Amaia Pérez Orozco, Chandra Talpade Mohanty – among many others, this project is a daring effort to analyze the status quo and imagine a world that doesn’t exist in the binary of “development” and “underdevelopment”. The project will be choreographed to manifest itself as a two-fold series of research, exhibitions, performances, lectures, workshops around the myths of “development” and “underdevelopment” as well as imagining and crafting a Post-(under)development world.
With this project we aim at shaping a network of activists, sonic agitators, scholars, artists and designers, political economists and practitioners, to share knowledge across languages as well as sonority to imagine and shape together a post developmental age. A pluriverse of interdependent imaginations, visions and strategies, away from capitalist and industrial productivity and toward transformative conviviality.
Team
ARTISTIC DIRECTION Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Agudio
Concept Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
CURATION Juan Pablo García Sossa, Hajra Haider Karrar
Curatorial Assistance Sagal Farah, Billy Fowo
Production Team Onur Çimen, Kelly Krugman
General Management Lema Sikod
Project Management Onur Çimen, Lia Milanesio
Communications Anna Jäger
Funding Funded by the TURN2 Fund of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). Funded by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media).
