Footprint 38 published

Footprint 38, positions Africa as a site for thinking and theorising worlds to come. Responding to persistent epistemic silences surrounding African discourse in architectural theory, the issue brings together situated writings that explore forms of attachment and worlding across African and Afro-diasporic peoples, places and objects.

Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s notion of re-enchantment and relational approaches to knowledge, the contributions intersect through four overlapping thematic lines of of ontological relationality in the form of infrastructural futuring, diasporic subjectivities, speculative futuring and cosmotechnical relationalities. Across research articles, dialogues and visual essays, contributors engage questions of infrastructure, memory, embodiment, ecology, technicity and speculative practice. Rather than proposing a singular account of African architectural thought, the issue assembles a heterogeneous field of perspectives in which architecture emerges as an assemblage becoming through socio-ecological, technical, economic and political relations that are continually activated and recomposed.