Designing Identities – Africa’s Postcolonial Shift in Design and Architecture, Manuel Herz & Achille Mbembe / TALK (EN)

In the initial decades of independence in many African nations, the applied arts and everyday culture served as a prominent vehicle for the construction of new, often pan-African identities, thus becoming part of the social experiment of African reinvention. The Cameroonian postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe
and the architect and author Manuel Herz discuss the role of design and architecture from the 1950s
through to the 1970s. The historic past is also probed for its present-day relevance: can looking back at
this era provide inspiration for current and future design tendencies? How can design and architecture trace and reflect certain political processes or even help shape them and thus contribute to social change? Free admission