Pan-African Translocal Media Workshop

This project grew out of Julie Mehretu’s commission to create the BMW Art Car #20. The second part of this commission is the Pan-African Translocal Media Workshop which is a rotating media arts workshop across five African cities (Dakar, Lagos, Tangier, Durban, and Nairobi) led by esteemed media artists working at the top of their game. These lead artists will facilitate workshops that bring artists on the continent and the diaspora together to learn from one another and create a collective work.

The Panafrican Translocal Media Workshop builds on the Exodus Media Workshop , which is an arts education laboratory initiated by Denniston Hill. The Exodus Media Workshop program begins from the shared intention that we must disentangle our experiences from their mediated representation, and that our selfhood must be reclaimed and reshaped by our own standards. This point of departure informs the genesis of the Pan-African Translocal Media Workshop and the ways in which it has been conceived.

"Pan-African" refers to a movement and ideology aimed at promoting unity and solidarity among African people and nations, as well as addressing issues that affect the African continent and its diaspora. The Pan-African movement gained momentum with the organization of several Pan-African Congresses in the early 20th century. These congresses were instrumental in bringing together African and African diasporic leaders to discuss strategies for achieving political and social change. We build on this legacy and extend it echoing Achille Mbembe:

“When I am saying a ‘person of African descent,’ I am not only saying as a Black person… A person of African descent in, if you want, the paleontological sense of the term, in the sense that if this is the color of humanity. What does it mean to be human, to inhabit the world as a human in the world of now? That is the fundamental question Pan-Africanism raised… in the 19th century, in the 20th century and now - even more so now that our fate as human beings is entangled with the fate of non-humans, of all living entities, on a planet, which… is in dire need of repair.”

The Pan-African Translocal Exodus Media Workshop will be kicking off in 2025 stay tuned for more.