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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.