Vol. 20 No. 1 (2026): Issue # 38 | African Dreams: Re-Enchantment Through Relational Ontologies

Footprint 38 positions Africa not as a territory to which architectural theory is applied, but as a generative site from which worlds to come might be thought and theorised. The issue responds to persistent epistemic silences surrounding African and other non-Western discourses in architectural theory by foregrounding situated forms of knowledge, attachment and worlding. Taking up Achille Mbembe’s notion of re-enchantment, the issue asks how relations weakened or divided by colonialism, racial capitalism and universalising forms of modernity might be imagined and composed otherwise. Re-enchantment is approached through relational ontologies, understood as forms of knowledge produced not simply about the world, but through situated intimacies among people, places, objects, technical systems and more-than-human environments. Across articles, visual essays and dialogues, the contributions follow four intersecting thematic lines of ontological relationality: infrastructural futuring, diasporic subjectivities, speculative futuring and cosmotechnical relationalities. Together, they explore infrastructures and technological flows, embodied and diasporic archives, speculative and reparative methods, indigenous and multispecies relations, and the technical mediation of memory and futurity. Rather than proposing a singular account of African architectural thought, Footprint 38 assembles a heterogeneous field of practices and perspectives. Across the issue, architecture emerges less as a fixed object than as an assemblage becoming through which socio-ecological, technical, economic and political relations are continuously activated and recomposed. Re-enchantment therefore becomes not a return to a lost wholeness, but an invitation to think and inhabit the world otherwise.

Issue editors: Gert van der Merwe and Serah Calitz