Sensing Nairobi We are a collection of artists, practitioners and critical thinkers who seek to sense and make sense of Nairobi. We are interested in capturing, reflecting and contributing to Nairobi’s multiple sensorial registers - smell, touch, taste, sound, texture, duration and ephemerality - as a way of critically engaging with the intersections of time, substance and space through which the city contingently emerges and becomes. Background Following the success of Remains, Waste and Metonymy I in 2015/16, Remains, Waste and Metonymy II: Sensing Nairobi moves forward our efforts to develop new collaborative interventions by narrowing our focus on the city(ies) of Nairobi. Bringing together a diversity of thinkers, artists and cultural producers, we seek to offer critical sensorial engagements with the temporal materialities and material temporalities from which the city continuously yet contingently emerges. In shared intellectual endeavor, performance and production, our purpose is not only to reflect and refract the cities’ complex multiplicities but to take part in its disparate becomings and ephemeral coherences in order to stake a claim on city’s potentialities and alternate possibilities. Sensing Nairobi concept: Nairobi exists in popular imagination as a series of clichés. From the famous sprawling slums of Kibera to Karen’s white mischief, from Westland’s gleaming malls and obsequious bars to the contested dumpsites of Dandora, and from its new bypasses to the rusty engines of the railway yard (to highlight only a few), Nairobi’s dominant images and narratives are often framed around tensed time - ordered and ordering temporalities imposed upon the spaces, substances and movements of the city. Against this grain of ordered time and space, Sensing Nairobi is about examining, touching, sensing the multiple, co-existent axis of time, substance and space along which Nairobi exists, moves, and constantly becomes. This becoming is multiple and contingent, and therefore it is relationally constituted and temporally situated. As a thing (or many things) as much as an idea (or many ideas), Nairobi is contingent upon our being in and with it every single second. We are all Nairobi. Defying conventional linear, sequential and progressive orderings of time that would locate Nairobi in a familiar temporal pattern of past forming present and leading ‘forward’ to the future, in our contention seemingly separate times already co-exist in the changing fabric and forms of the city itself. Hence exploring Nairobi must be, above all, a sensorial material quest, metonymic as much as metaphorical, of touch, sight, sounds and smell more than meaning, symbols or representation. Nairobi is less situated in time than many times and temporalities find situation in Nairobi, a scattering of co-existent presents, futures and pasts, and past futures and future pasts. As co-constituents of the city, we spread out and move across its multiple times as much as we are move across its multiple spaces. Our becoming with, and in, Nairobi, is a sensorial as much as a semantic proposition. If we are to see, sense, touch the transforming fabric of the city as a canvas, then what sensorial orderings, visual restraints and material disciplines must we employ to recognize, or rather stabilize, get hold off, the stuff of the city? And how does the stuff of the city defy as much as invoke our sensorial capacities of time, space and substance.
Program Friday 10 February – setting up day. Participants will set up their exhibitions and interventions at the BIEA, and satellite spaces around the city, focusing on process and collaboration. This will be open to interested visitors to peruse the setting up process and engage with participants in an informal setting
Saturday 11 February 11am Opening, with brief introduction 12-1pm Live-streaming from participating space WW 1-2pm Participants aa-bb will lead brief informal discussions about their work/installations 2-3pm Live-streaming from participating space XX 3-4pm Participants cc-dd will lead brief informal discussions about their work 4-5pm Live-streaming from participating space YY 5-6pm Participants ee-ff will lead brief informal discussions about their work 6-7pm Live-streaming from participating space ZZ 7pm onwards Music, food etc Sunday 12 February – Open day – for visitors to peruse exhibitions and installations
Live Streamiing
Brush Tu – Buruburu Foot prints A series of paintings exploring how everyday human interaction with physical spaces leave behind marks that alter the appearance of these spaces. The inspiration coming from spaces within Nairobi, the process entails creating layers from photographs and paint producing mixed media surfaces. The layers and marks represent the “foot Prints” left behind from everyday activities that happen in the city. These can include pasted posters on walls ,scratches, dents and general stress inflicted upon these structures. Maasai Mbili – Kibera The Hotel of The Oppressed (a play) In this new work, we re-imagine Mama Quinter hotel in the studio, a temporary construction typical of Kibera which serve both as business place and sleeping quarters for the residents. Most of the constructions and businesses are illegal and the residents build their own rules of engagement. Inside Mama Quinter’s are people and food that we believe is specific to Kibera. Here we look at how food contributes to the making of a vibrant sub-culture, the resultant architecture and language that continues to emerge around it. Mathare Social Justice Centre – Mathare JJ’s life story and Art for Social Justice For the first thirty minutes we will have JJ narrate his life story, he is a strong member of MSJC with an interesting background. For the next thirty minutes we will have art coordinator MSJC showcase an art for social justice presentation.
elias Mung’ora
Elias Mung’ora - Foot prints. A series of paintings exploring how everyday human interaction with physical spaces leave behind marks that alter the appearance of these spaces. The inspiration coming from spaces within Nairobi, the process entails creating layers from photographs and paint producing mixed media surfaces. The layers and marks represent the “foot Prints” left behind from everyday activities that happen in the city. These can include pasted posters on walls ,scratches, dents and general stress inflicted upon these structures. Elias a member of Brush-Tu Art Studio. He works mainly with paintings, drawings and photography. His work is mostly Inspired by his life in the urban environment of Nairobi. “The recurring theme in my work is daily life in Nairobi. My environment serves as an inspiration for my work. Working with photographs and paint mediums,i observe and try to translate to the best of my ability the little bits that contribute to the contemporary culture and general life in Nairobi.”
Wambui Kamiru
Wambui Kamiru Collymore - Akili Ni Nywele.
Wambui is a conceptual artist who has been developing artwork around the themes of colonialism, identity and independence in Africa. Recent works include: Tree – 2015, I’m moving out. Tomorrow – 2015, Your Name Betrays You - 2015, Who I Am, Who We Are - 2013 - 2016 and Harambee63 – 2013, 2016. Through contemporary art, Wambui tackles history, politics and social issues.
annie pfingst
Annie Pfingst - Petition Photographs from the sites of detention camps from the British colonial State of Emergency in the 1950s in the Coastal region are layered with text from petitions written by detainees held at Takwa Detention Camp on Manda Island, Lamu and submitted to the British Parliament. Petition is the latest of a series of works to visually map emergency landscapes and geographies of resistance, specifically the movement of detainees, including those from Nairobi, under emergency regulations, across the carceral landscape of the coastal region. Annie brings an interdisciplinary archival, visual and discursive practice to her ongoing investigation of emergency landscapes and geographies of resistance. She exhibited the photographic ‘Remnants, Archives and Landscapes’ at conferences and symposia at Karatina and Sydney, and in Nairobi at The Legacies of Struggle in Eastern and Southern Africa: Materiality, Biography and Human Remains, BIEA, in March 2015. ‘Emergency landscapes and geographies of resistance - a visual encounter’ was shown as part of Remains, Waste and Art - Performing Metonymy, BIEA in October 2015 and the National Museums of Kenya, in January 2016.
Joost Fontein & Meshack Oiro Demolition examines the use and reuse of different materials in the making and unmaking of the city, and how these are intertwined in the lives of Nairobi’s new demolition pioneers. Inspired by the emergence of Nairobi’s small scale demolition industry over the last decade, and informed by the longer history of 19th century importation of Mangalore roof tiles from India, and the subsequent emergence of Kenya’s own roof tile manufacturing industry in the early 20th century, this three part installation invites viewers to engage critically and experientially with the changing and recursive fabric of the city. Installation: consisting of exhibition of roof tiles and diary extracts; short film of Nairobi demolitions and the manufacture of new roof tiles; three mixed-media sculptures using used window and door frames, and miscellaneous rubble from demolition sites in Nairobi. Joost Fontein is a social anthropologist and Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa. His research explores the political and material imbrications of landscapes, things and human substances. He has done extended periods of ethnographic fieldwork in Zimbabwe since the late 1990s. His doctoral research, exploring the politics of heritage and landscape around Great Zimbabwe National Monument, won the ASA UK Audrey Richards Prize in 2004, and was published as a monograph in 2006. His second monograph Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (June 2015) explores the political materialities of belonging in the context of ‘Fast Track’ land reform around a modern dam in southern Zimbabwe. It was shortlisted as a finalist for the Melville Herskovitts prize by the ASA USA in 2016. He is now completing another book entitled The Politics of the Dead & the Power of Uncertainty: Essays on materiality, rumours and human remains in post-2000 Zimbabwe. He is a founding member of the Bones Collective research group, former editor of Journal of Southern African Studies (2008-2014), and co-founder of Critical African Studies. Meshack Oiro
james muriuki
neo Musangi
rxaxlxf
rxaxlxf - City Cotton In the early hours of the 10th of May 2013, City Cotton settlement in between Wilson Airport, South C estate and Moi Educational Centre (MEC) in Nairobi was attacked by a group of approximately 150 young men, backed up by a strong police force. The attacking force used the MEC grounds as their base to stage the attack from. The MEC is owned by the former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi. The group, identifying themselves as ‘Mungiki’ attacked the settlement around 4 AM with utmost brutality. Armed with machetes, crowbars, sledgehammers, and all kind of other tools and weapons, they started to break the huts of the settlement while most of the people were sleeping inside. Several huts collapsed with people inside, while anybody of the inhabitants who resisted was thoroughly attacked, beaten up and hacked by the armed goons. In several huts women were raped. My involvement I documented the scenery after the initial attack and continued to work with the community up to today. Partly due to the massive amount of evidence, Amnesty International decided to sponsor a court case of the community against the government of Kenya and MEC. In a landmark ruling, the community won this court case in November 2015. MEC decided to appeal against the case, which is currently in the Court of Appeal. The community & I received severe repercussions for resisting ‘the Powers that Be’. Though up to today we continue to fight for justice.
kevin oduor
constance smith