Interdependence - e-flux

Editors Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Colin Keays, Federico Martelli

Contributors Keleketla! Library, Sumayya Vally, Eléonore Hellio, Papa Omotayo, Bhavisha Panchia, Carly Whitaker, Chad Cordeiro, Oris Aigbokhaevbolo, Terra Alta Community, Bernard Akoi-Jackson, and more…

Inventive forms of collaborative and critical practice are often born in cities where the infrastructure of cultural funding and subsidies is limited. In parallel to supporting artists and curators themselves, independent art initiatives often serve fundamental roles in their wider communities, too. Artists and curators are rooted in local contexts, and can have a pragmatic understanding of the needs of their neighbors that extend beyond artistic collaboration.

Interdependence is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and OtherNetwork supported by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.

2022 Research Team Samantha Modisenyane, Abraham Tettey, Lucille de Witte
2025 Research Team Matheus dos Reis, Camila Alegría, Camilo Quiroga

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16 essays

Building Ideas from the Middle

Abidin Kusno and Gudskul

Spatially, Jakarta is a city that has gone far beyond Sukarno’s expectations in the 1950s, when he demanded a three-dimensional modernist city.

A Lexicon for an Art Institution

Benjamin Seroussi

We started to ask ourselves: What if an art institution wasn’t stuck to a fixed grid (exhibitions, seasons, workshops, etc.)?

Art Organizing as a Rhizomatic Practice

Dan Tran

In Vietnam, Heritage Art Space is not the oldest independent art space. Nevertheless, the evolving forms of its activities amid changing material conditions is revelatory of the complexities of art-making and audience-building to foster a resilient domestic art ecosystem in the fast-developing and liberalizing Vietnam.

Elective Affinities for the Common Good

Gabriela Jauregui

The Insurgentes subway station is one of the main arteries in the beating heart of Mexico City.

A Shelter for Art at the Dawn of the Proletariat

Juan José Santos

Electrified voices emerge from inside the house, as if an interview was being recorded. This is the headquarters of the community television channel Señal 3 of the La Victoria settlement, which broadcasts a daily program dedicated to the vicissitudes of the community.

Editorial

OtherNetwork and e-flux Architecture

Interdependence, a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and OtherNetwork, returns, featuring contributions by Gabriela Jauregui on Aeromoto, Juan José Santos on Galería Metropolitana, Benjamin Seroussi on Casa do Povo, Dan Tran on Heritage Space, and an independent contribution by Gudskul.

A Home in the World

Christian Nyampeta and Feza Kayungu Ramazani

When describing the time leading up to the beginnings of Centre d’art Waza, an art center in Lubumbashi that he co-founded in 2010 and has led ever since, Patrick Mudekereza speaks in a voice full of gratitude and contagious with joy.

Shattering the Structure

Christ Mukenge, Lydia Schellhammer, and Sorana Munsya

From my point of view, your way of producing art in Kinshasa and circulating it creates surreal situations by breaking down the boundaries that separate social, geographical, and conceptual realities that coexist in the same space of the city. Could you tell us how your duo came about?

From Facing the Mirror to Intentional Conversations

Bernard Akoi-Jackson

It is September 4, 2022, the day our comrade and friend, Isaac Nana Osei Kwadwo (aka Ashanti immigrant) would be finally laid to rest in his hometown in Offinso, Ashanti Region, Ghana.

Terra By The Way

Terra Alta Community

To some people, it’s a barely noticeable gate in the slip road by a busy highway, concealed by a splatter of potted plants and tall trees. To others, it’s a curiosity, an enigma, either a place of derision or wonder. It’s good, bad, confusing, needed, comforting, unsettling, too broad, and too specific by turns.

Dreaming Art in an Unlikely Place

Oris Aigbokhaevbolo

Depending on the direction you are coming from, you may need to walk or drive through a street with a confusion of names to get to the Vernacular Art-...

The Studio as a Shared Collaborative Space: Notes on a Prototype

Bhavisha Panchia, Carly Whitaker, and Chad Cordeiro

The ecology of the artworld in South Africa today relies on support from public and private institutions. Yet there is a deficiency of state and municipal funding for maintaining public art institutions as well as supporting exhibition programming, acquisitions, and publishing.

Removing Barriers, Elevating Practices

Papa Omotayo

The Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA) was founded as a not-for-profit art space, gallery, library and educational center in 2007, a year before my first visit. Its intention was to allow new voices to emerge along with new forms of artistic thought and expression. A space for Lagosians to find, interact, learn, and share from the wealth of creative knowledge and practice that has existed and exists in the city as well as from places far and wide.

GHeTTo GeT In-GrOw Up!

Eléonore Hellio

Originally from this vast region, Bebson Elemba aka Bebson de la Rue is in the process of turning his Ngbwaka home into an autonomous space for collective participatory creation. Step by step, an informal avant-garde will begin to take shape around his artistic practice.

My Ever Whirling Dust

Keleketla! Library and Sumayya Vally

The history of the Drill Hall, of the 1956 Treason Trial, became fertile ground to expand our programming with the After School Programme. Some of the publications that we printed about the heritage of the Drill Hall and the history of South Africa were meant to become integrated in local school curricula, which doesn’t speak much about the 1956 Treason Trial.

Editorial

Colin Keays, Federico Martelli, and e-flux Architecture

Subject

Architecture, Museology, Africa, Collaboration, Networks, Postcolonialism

Interdependence is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and OtherNetwork supported by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.

Contributors

Abidin Kusno and Gudskul Building Ideas from the Middle
Benjamin Seroussi A Lexicon for an Art Institution
Dan Tran Art Organizing as a Rhizomatic Practice
Gabriela Jauregui Elective Affinities for the Common Good
Juan José Santos A Shelter for Art at the Dawn of the Proletariat
OtherNetwork and e-flux Architecture Editorial
Christian Nyampeta and Feza Kayungu Ramazani A Home in the World
Christ Mukenge, Lydia Schellhammer and Sorana Munsya Shattering the Structure
Bernard Akoi-Jackson From Facing the Mirror to Intentional Conversations
Terra Alta Community Terra By The Way
Oris Aigbokhaevbolo Dreaming Art in an Unlikely Place
Bhavisha Panchia, Carly Whitaker and Chad Cordeiro The Studio as a Shared Collaborative Space: Notes on a Prototype
Papa Omotayo Removing Barriers, Elevating Practices
Eléonore Hellio GHeTTo GeT In-GrOw Up!
Keleketla! Library and Sumayya Vally My Ever Whirling Dust
Colin Keays, Federico Martelli and e-flux Architecture Editorial

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