This project is described in the Yona Friedman dossier, AP FRIE, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
African Maker Fairs have been sponsored largely by US technology corporations, while makerspaces have been set up often sponsored wholly or in part by U.S. corporations, such as General Electric’s “Garages” in Algiers and Lagos. There are research incubators such as Gearbox in Nairobi, funded by Autodesk and US philanthropic concerns. There are also the Fab Labs (Fabrication Laboratories) begun by MIT as global outposts but now autonomously sponsored.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 17–22.
Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” October, 34 (Autumn, 1985): 63.
Derrida discusses Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage in Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, Play,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 285–288.
Foster, 64.
Yona Friedman, Une architecture de survie: Une Philosophie de la pauvreté (Paris : Éditions de l’éclat, 2013 {1978}), 33 and 182-183. Translation by author unless otherwise indicated.
Friedman, Une architecture de survie, 183.
Friedman, Une architecture de survie, 193.
Yona Friedman, “La Ville Totale,” with Kenzo Tange, Nicholas Negroponte, and Richard Buckminster Fuller in: 2000 24 (1971): 7, in Getty Research Institute, Yona Friedman Papers, Box 5, Folder 33: 7.
It is not clear whether Friedman had read Lévi-Strauss, although it seems likely given Friedman’s interest in anthropology, cybernetics, and bricolage. On methods of bricolage, see Lévi-Strauss, 17–22.
Lévi-Strauss, 17.
Ijlal Muzaffar, “The Periphery Within: Modern Architecture and the Making of the Third World” (Ph.D. Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007).
Yona Friedman, “Weeds into Wealth,” 1983, in Getty Research Institute, Yona Friedman papers: Box 25: Folder 8. Yona Friedman, “Wasteland into Farmland,” in Getty Research Institute, Yona Friedman papers: Box 25: Folder 19.
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Taboo and Pollution (London; New York: Routledge, 2002 {1966}).
Many scholars have considered weeds in relation to Douglas’s concept of “matter out of place.” For a discussion of some of the relevant literature, see Candice Bradley, “Keeping the Soil in Good Heart: Women, Weeders, and Ecofeminism,” in Ecofeminism: Women Culture, Nature, ed. Karen J. Warren (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997): 291–293. Of relevance to architectural theory, see David Gissen, Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 150–167.
Industrial waste and discarded industrial scraps both being conceived as subsets of pollution, whether because of actual toxicity or merely because of their unwanted occupation of space. On the materiality of waste, see for example Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). See also Joshua Reno, “Waste and Waste Management,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 44 (2015): 557–572.
It should be mentioned that one of AMP’s co-founders is a native Ghanaian, trained at Harvard University.
For AMP’s general concept, see ➝.
On “moving beyond a notion of e-waste,” see ➝ (emphasis added).
Jennifer Gabrys has stressed that the recycling of e-waste always entails its own “inassimilable remainders,” a residual pollution that is often omitted from accounts of recycling promulgated in environmental discourses. See Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 132.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), Parts 2 & 3.
Agamben, Part 1.
To demonstrate what I mean, I would point out that the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jewry—the arch-example Agamben offers of a “state of exception”—did not constitute an exception to the legal framework that prohibited murder. Rather, as is well known, this extermination required the semiotic rendition of human citizens into non-human non-citizens, a task carried out by explicit propaganda but also by more subtle discursive and aesthetic formulations.
“After 2 Years, Ship Dumps Toxic Ash” New York Times, November 28, 1988.
Josh Lepawsky analyzes the geographic assumptions and inequalities underlying the Basel Convention in Lepawsky, “Are We Living in a Post-Basel World?,” Area 47, 1 (2015): 7–15.
See for example the methods of Slum Dwellers’ International (SDI) ➝. For a critique of privatization of favela usufruct property, see Timothy Mitchell, “The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World,” European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes De Sociologie / Europäisches Archiv Für Soziologie 46, no. 2 (2005): 297–320.
One of the most symptomatic examples of the rising usage of “jua kali” in reference to high-tech culture appears in Steve Daniels’ codification and mapping of Nairobi’s repair shops in Making Do: Innovation in Kenya’s Informal Economy (self- published: 2010).
One example of the celebration of e-waste in African Maker Culture is Take Kodjo Afate Gnikou’s 3D printer, which he fabricated at Woe Lab. Gniko, from Togo, garnered acclaim in a recent Maker Faire in Africa for having fabricated a 3D printer almost exclusively from salvaged waste (with some remaining parts funded by Kickstarter) ➝.