Breathing Room: Working Principles of Independent Art Spaces in African Cities

This article surfaces five key working principles shared by five independent contemporary art spaces. Despite taking various forms, all operate as noncommercial platforms in fast-urbanizing African cities: Nairobi, Accra, Cairo, Addis Ababa, and Dar es Salaam. These key findings emerged from the study Platform/Plotform, in which I observed emblematic programming during fieldwork to each participant art space. My research method made correlations between the practices of participant spaces and their urban context, which induced the interrelated working principles between art and the city.¹ The underlying premise is that such spaces innovate ways of doing that relate to material realities of everyday life in the continent, and this in turn has broader resonance beyond the art world for others also navigating conditions of accelerated flux. They offer ideas around future organizational forms through context-specific, participatory solutions, and they disrupt conventional notions of sustainability. In short, the research study considers...