The Insurgentes subway station is one of the main arteries in the beating heart of Mexico City. It is where an epic battle between punks and emos took place in the early 2000s. It is where the local shoe-shine guy and the lady who delivers tupperware meals to office workers, come to work after hours-long commutes. It is also home to Aeromoto, or “airquake”.

Electrified voices emerge from inside the house, as if an interview was being recorded. This is the headquarters of the community television channel Señal 3 of the La Victoria settlement, which broadcasts a daily program dedicated to the vicissitudes of the community. On the façade is a motto: “Communication at the service of the people.”

The first time I entered Casa do Povo was in 2011. As an editor of a Jewish magazine at the time, I wanted to interview figures from the former Ashkenazi quarter in downtown São Paulo, Brazil. I had scheduled an interview with the eighty-three-year-old leader of a Yiddish choir called Coral Tradição. It gathered mostly elderly women to sing on Monday nights, in Yiddish, for no one.

In much of the Western world, trust in culture is wavering, as museums and cultural institutions once seen as possible vehicles for emancipatory struggle have revealed themselves to be among the main administrators of state censorship. However, for many cultural practitioners in the global majority, this trust has never been there.

How do urban development projects reinforce asymmetrical power dynamics – and how can artistic practice document or expose this? These questions, rooted in the urban context of Medellín, were introduced by OtherNetwork researcher Camilo Quiroga during a panel discussion at Fundación Casa Tres Patios on 28 November 2024.

Meet Baleska, a hard-working van belonging to Instituto Tele Arte in Santiago. In October 2024, OtherNetwork supported curator Enrique Flores (Instituto Telearte) and artist Paulina Mellado (Oficinas Meteoro) in their ambitious road-trip exhibition across the Atacama desert, bringing the work of 18 artists to new audiences from Santiago to Copiapó and back.

We met with Kinshasa-based art platform Laboratoire Kontempo to discuss their extended practice through the Congolese capital. Together with Cameroonian curator Dzekashu MacViban, Lydia Schellhammer and Christ Mukenge from Laboratoire Kontempo discuss their upcoming curatorial project “Kokende Liboso Eza Kokoma Te”, which centres around proverbs in different cultures through the African continent.

In a world increasingly dominated by digital interactions, Akwasi Afrane invites us to reflect on the hidden costs of our trans-digital obsessions. Through the creative reimagining of discarded electronic gadgets, Afrane offers a critical examination of the environmental impact of our hyperconnected digital ecosystem.

For the third iteration of OtherNetwork’s flagship curatorial project, NGO - Nothing Gets Organised partnered with renowned Brazilian non-profit art space Pivô, for a conversation between the cities of Johannesburg and São Paulo.

On a resting rural road, desiccated dust rises from the pressure of tyres. Earth ascends towards the sky, creating a microclimate of red clay clouds around the road, the tyres, and the passengers. A trail of red mist follows as they journey to Wa.

As developers of the OtherNetwork platform, we were faced with the challenge of establishing a format for a website that moulds an existing shared reality rather than imposing a new one? How to visualise data in a way that is collaborative, and non-extractive?

A parasite is a key feature of any system, acting as a “thermal exciter” that alters the nature of the environment to which it belongs. The independent spaces within Bogotá’s art scene have acted as parasites in this sense, as opposed to the commonly construed notion of an organism that lives off others.

As queer activists in Ghana fighting against the anti-LGBTQ bill, we realised that the kinds of violence or the kind of systems that we have to change go beyond just legal: we are fighting to help change the narrative.

Independent art spaces – or offspaces in artworld speak – are shapeshifters that constantly metamorphose in response to accelerated flux and uncertainty. This includes reincarnating into second lives, or sometimes even dying when the time is right. Such redirection, through a dual strategy of refusal and reimagination, is how they sustain themselves

Since the foundation of OtherNetwork, we have used the notion of independence as a provocation, embracing the friction that the term itself may cause in an effort to redefine and unpack what it means to produce culture at the margins of society.

FCA Ghana co-director Ato Annan discusses how the space became a hub for Accra’s wider artistic community, before being joined by Sinethemba Twalo from NGO to talk about collaborative modes of artistic production, and their mutual appreciation of the inspirational figure of W.E.B. Du Bois, whose final home and resting place sets the scene for the exhibition.

OYO Project has always been a nomadic project. At first, we worked in several different public spaces. But after a while, working in the street became dangerous because the police wouldn’t let the youth assemble in public. Young people also had a hard time staying focused in open spaces.

On 20 December, OtherNetwork hosted the event ‘Conversaciones entre valles, ríos y montañas’. Hosted by Camilo Quiroga, the event delved into cultural production among regions outside of the Colombian capital that are often overlooked for their artistic output at a national level.

On 14 December 2023, OtherNetwork researcher Camila Alegría Z. invited renowned feminist performance collective Las Tesis for a discussion at Espacio Checoeslovaquia, an experimental performance space in the San Joaquin neighbourhood of Santiago.

“Waza,” which means “thinking” or “imagination” in Swahili, emerged through friendships between artists and cultural workers living in Lubumbashi. The space quickly became a bustling meeting place for all manner of artists who congregated there to work.

Following the debut OtherNetwork exhibition curated by Foundation for Contemporary Art-Ghana at ifa Gallery Stuttgart in 2022, the curatorial project continues in the form of a relay. For the second iteration, FCA-Ghana have invited NGO–Nothing Gets Organised from Johannesburg to guest curate an exhibition at their own space in Accra.

On October 12 2023, OtherNetwork hosted an event at PIVÔ, an experimental art space in one of the city’s most iconic modernist buildings, designed by Oscar Niemeyer.

On September 30, 2023, members of Accra’s creative community gathered at Worldfaze to participate in a dynamic panel discussion hosted by OtherNetwork revolving around the pivotal theme of nurturing collaboration among independent cultural venues, while offering insights and strategies to ensure their sustainability and growth.

Join us at the Museum of Science and Technology in Accra, Ghana for a conversation between Nuna Adisenu-Doe, founder of the nomadic Compound House Gallery, and Ylinka Barotto, director at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York. Together they unpack the thriving art scene in Accra and the growing global recognition of Ghanaian artists.

On September 15, 2023, OtherNetwork hosted an intimate panel discussion at The Library of Things We Forgot To Remember – an interactive sound and visual archive of black resistance that was founded in 2017 by Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai.

Together we discuss the different approaches to founding a new art space versus inheriting one with a longstanding history, and the responsibilities a curator has to both artists and audiences.

The first local event hosted by OtherNetwork as part of its international cultural programme in 2023 took place on 13 July at Espacio Odeón – an experimental art space in a former theatre building – in which six invited guests spoke about their experience in creating, directing, or managing independent cultural projects in the Colombian capital.

It is almost midday on a mellow Sunday afternoon in Accra. It is September 4, 2022, the day our comrade and friend, Isaac Nana Osei Kwadwo (aka Ashanti immigrant) would be finally laid to rest in his hometown in Offinso, Ashanti Region, Ghana. On Saturday, September 3, the entire art community in Accra had gathered in the grounds of the W. E. B. Dubois Centre to mourn…

A growing collection of shipping containers. A round concrete seat with a wooden bench. A tiny urban farm growing local vegetables and herbs. Terra Alta is, for me, a push always towards higher ground. But to other people, what exactly is it? We asked our community to help us answer.

Depending on the direction you are coming from, you may need to walk or drive through a street with a confusion of names to get to the Vernacular Art-space Laboratory (VAL) in Iwaya, a community along the coast of mainland Lagos. Once known by one name, the street is on the verge of getting subsumed by another.

Throughout history, large art museums and cultural institutions have been instrumental in forging powerful myths. To control a museum, as art historian Carol Duncan wrote, “means precisely to control the representation of a community and its highest values and truths. It is also the power to define the relative standing of individuals within that community.”

I was trying to trace footsteps, memories of a time that lay somewhere between myth and someone else’s life. Hours had now passed, walking, in a slight daze, crisscrossing Murtala Muhammed Way and the gridded streets of the southern area of Yaba that formed the historical Ebutte Metta, a Yoruba settlement of the Egba people from the Abeokuta kingdom. I was now on Borno Street.

‘If we’re happy in our dreams, does that count?’ was the first edition of an ongoing curatorial project organised by OtherNetwork that takes the form of a relay: for each iteration, one independent art space acts as host and is given the opportunity to invite another space from somewhere in the world to be their guest.

The ecology of the artworld in South Africa today relies on support from public and private institutions. Yet there is a deficiency of state and municipal funding for maintaining public art institutions as well as supporting exhibition programming, acquisitions, and publishing. This has led to privately-funded institutions…

We’re in the 1990s in Ngbwaka, a district of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This district was renamed during the Zairianisation period (1971–1997), by the Ngbwaka, a forest people whose territory stretches from the province of Équateur to the north-west of the country and beyond.

We are currently located in Troyeville, which is on the east side of the city, close to Maboneng, and just next to the Jeppe police station. We are there as part of our placemaking and worldmaking practice, but also as part of our ethical exile from the Drill Hall.