Conversations, from other perspectives 2023–26
“A true palimpsest city, Dakar has been a fertile ground for experimentation and forward-thinking. It is a place where a lot of questions about the future of cities are still being posed, some are unique to the context and others are universal. More specifically, in a country of 18 million people with less than 300 registered architects and the absence of a national school of architecture since 1991, we are faced with the challenge of defining what is the role of the architect and of architecture. For architects living and working in Dakar, research is critical for learning about the context despite the lack of resources on architecture. To access knowledge and engage in a debate on the place of architecture in our societies, one must think creatively and work across disciplines, ranging from art, craft anthropology, sociology and history. Through this work, we can find new languages to convey ideas about architecture to the people and create archives and repositories in order to make knowledge available.” —Nzinga Biegueng Mboup
Dakar will be the fourth city to anchor our CCA c/o program, to engage new contexts and reveal thematic convergences across perspectives. Through a dispersed network, we have questioned our own points of view by asking to hear those of others; from Lisbon (curated by Artéria), Tokyo (curated by Kayoko Ota), Buenos Aires (curated by Martin Huberman), and now in Dakar, to be curated by Nzinga Biegueng Mboup.
Agile and informal, CCA c/o sets down where an interesting architectural discussion is taking place and where an accomplice can offer a unique perspective. They can be independent curators, architects, journalists, photographers, and editors—or other interesting figures we find along the way—but we welcome them as part of the CCA. Sometimes we host them, other times they host us. Each iteration is different.
Starting in summer 2023, we are collaborating with Nzinga Biegueng Mboup to produce a series of public programs and research projects in Dakar. She is an architect, curator, and co-founder of Worofila with Nicolas Rondet, a practice that specializes in bioclimatic architecture and construction using earth and biomaterial sourced locally. With Caroline Geffriaud she is the co-author of the forthcoming title Habiter Dakar, and together with Elementerre and Chérif Tall she co-produced the installation Bunt BAN as a participant in Guests from the Future at the Biennale Architettura 2023.
What characterizes the practice of contemporary Senegalese and African architects? How does it relate to architectural heritage on the continent and what are the new ways in which we are establishing new forms of practice to respond to the urging questions of our time? What type of future do we want to create?
As Dakar sits on a peninsula with a coastline that is increasingly being built on and destroyed, with more frequent inundations and increasingly covered in concrete, what can we do to connect more with the natural environment and create a more liveable city?
These are some of the questions that architects working in Dakar are facing today, and that we plan to tackle with the CCA c/o Dakar program. This program will also be a way to activate the production and dissemination of knowledge to breed the ground for the collective appropriation of new forms of building and practice that respond to the preoccupation and evolution of Senegalese and African society.
CCA c/o Dakar will expand on the CCA’s own investigations into questions related to the African continent and to the environment, including the multi-disciplinary research project Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture and its forthcoming publication Fugitive Archives: A Sourcebook for Centring Africa in Histories of Architecture: a collection of micro-archives, each an argument for the role of primary research in locating, accessing, and constructing the new forms of evidence needed to create African architectural archives that are situated (to be published this summer by the CCA and Jap Sam Books).
For more, and to find out about the upcoming conversations in Dakar, subscribe here.
