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

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.