In its inaugural year (2025), the foundations were laid for a five-year inquiry, starting with the broad thematic of Culture & Technics. Its first workshop, convened in October last year, was a three-day event comprising discussions, visits to art spaces, a public art walk in the city centre, curatorial tour of an exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA as well as Iyatsiba’s own Tales of History Retold exhibition, and its partnered zine-making workshop. Video content from this inaugural workshop can be viewed at this link.
This year, the convening theme is Technics and the Urban. In this year’s September workshop, we explore movement within and across cityscapes by reflecting on aesthetic interventions that encourage new forms of rhythmic solidarities and voicing of structures. With a focus on technics – or machinic assemblages that produce heterogeneous futures through arts practices and the rearrangement of desires – this workshop will lay out the frameworks for assembling urban histories and experiences by harnessing the mediative potential of arts in the evolving relationship between the human and technology.
The workshop gathers together invited scholars and artists, postgraduate students/ fellows associated with the CHR, and its faculty, and will be framed by Shaunak Sen’s award-winning documentary film, All That Breathes. The programming is split between dialogue and site visits to art spaces to help contextualise and inflect debate. The dialogue is curated along several prompts to lead us into an interwoven discussion: the sentient city; meditations on utopia; theory from a ruined city; the hospitable city; institutional forms; the séance of the city, and the invisible city.
