Writer and historian Max Diallo Jakobsen presented “Revolutionary Forms,” preliminary research into the aesthetic and material infrastructures that connected West and Southern Africa during the independence era.
Max examined how the poetry of revolution functioned as the actual infrastructure through which autonomy was imagined and built, and how so little of it is still standing today.
Taking as a starting point the Zambezi discotheque, a nightclub founded by Miriam Makeba in Conakry in the late 1960s, Max traced how cultural networks formed between Guinea and Zambia (and beyond). These visions were as ambitious as they were fragile, and revisiting them from Lusaka offers nuanced forms of understanding pan-African solidarities.
The open studio featured research materials on view, a preview reading from his forthcoming essay “A Letter from Lusaka,” and a conversation with Bruno Milambo on working between archives and geographies and was followed by Q&A and discussion.
