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WCSCD Defining curating Defining WCSCD Situating Our Vision Our Values Our Priorities Our Team Programs & Inquiries Plans 2022-2025 Thinking with. Defining curating WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO?—WCSCD was initiated in 2018 in Belgrade as an educational platform focused around notions of the curatorial and is a registered civic association. WCSCD was established by Biljana Ciric and these two bodies are deeply entangled and define themselves as she/her. These two bodies are relational and hoping to be transformed by the relationships they are entangled with. Their mode of existence, visibility and opacity in the world is shaped by thinking and walking with an advisory group—which since 2020 has consisted of Matt Packer, Andrea Palasti and Ares Shporta—as an exercise in how to become more than yourself- pluralself (Rolando Vazquez). Defining these two entangled bodies as she/her, we are hoping to engage in larger conversations of deconstruction and of imagining institutions by decolonizing our expectations. What do we mean when we say curating? We understand curatorial practice as walking with. We mean walking not as a way of getting somewhere, but walking with, as sharing time and creating space for unevenness to co-exist. When writing about walking, Canadian geographer Juanita Sundberg separates this into two steps. The first step is positioning, which is locating my body-knowledge in relation to the existing paths I know and walk. Sundberg defines the second step as walking with. “Walking with means ‘reciprocal respect for the autonomy and independence of organizations’ involved in the struggle; in other words, respect for the multiplicity of life worlds. Step two, then, involves learning to learn about multiplicity.” What do we mean when we ask the question What Could/Should Curating Do? We propose this question in order to engage with practices and encourage curating to stay dynamic and responsive in the world around me, anchored in caring with. Situating We are situated in Belgrade, Serbia, where the work of cultural workers is undervalued. A very big part of myself is also situated in the places where our collaborators struggle working under similar conditions. We are also with many bodies that experience and fight against the extraction of natural resources and exploitation of human and more than human worlds. Our Vision We dream and practice contemporary culture as a political movement that stand against that moves away from certain economically bounded locations creating the conditions for us on the margins to participate in discussions where our futures are negotiated and our pasts reflected on. I dream of an instituting model that is attentive to human and more than human worlds, asking myself who I am in relation to others. Our Values Education and new methodologies Ambition and openness to failure as part of the learning process Professional network of colleagues and peers who think together with me Slow modes of working that allow for deeper entanglements Our Priorities Ways of doing based on a pedagogy of positionality Education and methodologies I use in creating new kinds of human Creating citations in art practices from the margins that contribute to the global Ways of working together that are long-term and based on the equal sharing of resources Creating conditions for equal participation within contexts that are economically uneven Contributing to practising towards sustainable art institutions Our Team Founding Director Biljana Ciric what.could.curating.do@gmail.com WCSCD previous team members: Sasa Tkacenko, Katarina Kostandinovic, Ana Anakijev, Aigierim Kapar. WCSCD existing programs and inquiries 2018-2022 WCSCD’s main program focus is an educational program and long-term inquiries towards decolonizing modes of relationality within the arts. WCSCD’s education program has been run on an annual basis every year since 2018. It is a three-month program for practitioners situated in Belgrade. In 2020 I started the first curatorial inquiry of WCSCD in the form of a long-term research project: As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future looking at the impact of BRI in Central Asia, Balkan, Ethiopia and China. The project is structured around partner cells: Zdenka Badovinac (Ljubljana), Robel Temesgen and Sinkneh Eshetu (Addis Ababa), Public Library Bor (Bor), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Times Museum (Guang Zhou), Artcom platform (Almaty) and WCSCD (Belgrade). Our plans 2022-2025 My plan is to work with a group of colleagues to bring WCSCD into a new stage of positioning itself. In this phase WCSCD will consider itself in relation to merging the rural and the urban, through an open inquiry into what it means when an art institution becomes a custodian of the land. I am hoping to explore the role of art institutions within rural-urban, nature-culture relations and possible sustainable economies for both. I hope that our entanglement will bring long lasting alliances, bringing like-minded practitioners together to work collectively on deconstructing our methodologies of working within the arts. Thinking with. Since 2020 I have been thinking with Matt Packer (director of Eva International), Andrea Palasti (artist and educator Novi Sad) and Ares Shporta (director of Lumbardhi Foundation) as part of an active advisory group. From 2023 we will continue without Ares as he is starting a new chapter in his life and we thank him for his insight and knowledge. From 2023 we will welcome to the advisory group Amelie Aranguren (head of artistic programming at INLAND’s Center for the Approach to the Rural (CAR) in Madrid and Inland member since 2010.) Besides the Advisory Group we I have been accompanied in thinking and practising with Susie Quillinan and Madeliene Collie through Study Pattern. Defining WCSCD Situating Our Vision Our Values Our Priorities Programs & Inquiries Plans 2022-2025 Thinking with. Our Team

< Back Beating Around the Bush: Some Reflections on the Crisis of “Imported Cases” of Africans in Guangzhou 20 June 2020 Berhanu On April 15th, four days after the CNN coverage of the eviction of Africans in Guangzhou [1] , a message from a WeChat group [2] rang an alarm on my phone. Some Chinese volunteers helping the Africans’ in Guangzhou were just tipped off by a microblogger (the Chinese equivalent of Tweeter), who tagged the microblog of the Bureau of Guangzhou Public Security. The blogger asserted that those volunteers were calling for ordinary Chinese to help Africans, which would inevitably expand the pool of contacts [of asymptomatic carriers], during a crucial time when the Guangzhou authority was screening the population for epidemiological purposes and when nobody would know who had contracted the virus. “Are they [the volunteers] spreading [the COVID-19] intentionally?” the blogger asked rhetorically. Indignant at the blogger’s unfair charge against volunteers who aimed to address the clear and present threats, including displacement, the risk of contracting virus, panic, financial loss and hunger, I sent him a private message, intending to forestall his report. “Can you imagine the xenophobia in African societies would cause another wave of ‘imported cases’ of returning Chinese expats if the Africans in Guangzhou were not treated well?” I meant that there are millions of Chinese working and living in Africa, far outnumbered the Africans in China. In this deeply interwoven world, a flapping of a butterfly would not only trigger a tornado far away, but the tornado would backlash and engulf the butterfly in no time. The reply: “where are you from, idiot?”. And I was unfriended by him in a second. The blogger’s report seemed to have taken effect. The next day, several volunteers were summoned by the local policemen, and their actions were called to halt. The intervention dampened the volunteers’ enthusiasm and disrupted their charity work. Several WeChat groups initiated by volunteers to provide correct information, organise food delivery and translation services, were dismissed one by one. Though unfriended, I was still able to browse the microblogger’s webpage. I discovered that the screenshot of my short-lived conversation with him was posted atop. It was liked by hundreds and followed by many derisive mocks. Scrolling down the page, I found that he constantly hunts the misconducts of African students and passes his evidence to public authorities and other microbloggers. Likewise, the posts of the latter are teemed with anti-black, anti-Muslim, and even anti-feminism remarks. No wonder the volunteers fell prey — any assistance they offered to the evicted Africans would be reckoned as a collaboration with unwelcomed foreigners. But where does such hatred come from? How does it relate to the reality in Guangzhou? Like scientists who are able to determine the genetic composition of any life form, let me start by examining the emergence of this social phenomenon the same way. DNA sequencing of the Microbloggers’ narrative Scholars have recently noticed the right-wing populism emerging on Chinese social media and the jargons netizens have coined. The so-called White-Leftist ( baizuo ), repeatedly used in netizen’s vilifying their enemies, is key to the understanding of the ideological genesis. Cheng Yinghong (2018) argues that the neologism reflects the identification of some Chinese with their imagined western (white) world, as well as their vicarious lamentation on the decline of western civilization, which they blame on the leftists’ advocating multiculturalism, feminism, and immigrants’ rights. Just as the Western ‘White Left’ is the internal enemy to the Western civilization, the Chinese liberals are both ‘White Left’ and traitors of the Han Chinese [3] , the majority of Chinese people. Han-traitor ( hanjian ) and White-leftist are thus used interchangeably. [4] Zhang Chenchen (2020) reaches a similar conclusion through qualitative analysis of more than 1,000 postings from a popular online community zhihu , a Quora-like forum, offering a portrayal of the political stances of well-educated and well-informed Chinese internet users. They criticise Western hegemony on one hand, and construct China’s ethno-racial and political identities through downplaying the ‘inferior’ non-Western groups, namely the immigrants, Muslims, and feminists, on the other. [5] While Cheng and Zhang’s discussion help us to explore the way some Chinese netizens make sense of and place themselves in the world’s hierarchy, my aim is to look into other factors that contribute to the identity making of the microbloggers as well as a few new trends. Forging a coherent identity nonetheless involves contradiction. Many microbloggers involved in the anti- discourses see themselves as rather victims. The threat is from the alleged high birth rate of immigrants and domestic Muslims. They quote the high birth rates of sub-Saharan countries moving to Europe and that of Chinese Muslims, believing that the birth control policy on Han Chinese would only shrink the relative size of the Han people and undermine the nation’s future. Their misgivings have theoretical ground, though, from an influential book titled Big Country of an Empty Nest . The book was forbidden in mainland China in 2007 for its criticism of the one-child policy. It argues that if couples are not allowed to give birth to more than two children, the population would inevitably decline, and the aging parents in their empty ‘nests’ would have no children to take care of them. The ban of the book was not lifted until 2013 when China’s stringent birth control policy loosened. Yet the anxiety passed on to cyberspace, this time projecting to the growing presence of domestic Muslims and Africans in Chinese cities, quite similar to the Great Replacement theory [6] upheld by their western counterparts. Feminism, which embraces liberty on marriage among other political and social equalities, becomes the antithesis of the defenders of the nation, too, because any Chinese women who marry out to other races would be the loss of the assets of the civilization. Perhaps what runs deep is kind of misogyny: men desired women; but owing to a sense of deprivation they instead grow hostility towards their potential, marriageable nationals who turn to other nationals or races. And this misogynist sentiment takes place at the level of civilization which at some points is criticizing the state, which I shall discuss later. Of course, it is not new, for the hatred towards some African students has its precedent in the 1980s. [7] Back then, the Chinese students conflicted with African students who played loud music and dated Chinese girls. [8] Thirty years later, thanks to the expansion of Chinese education system and the Belt and Road Initiative, the African students now make up 1/7 of the total overseas students by 2016, [9] and the trope of “taking our girls ” comes back on cyberspace, this time fuelled by a new charge. The African students are imagined as receiving decent scholarships and other “super-national treatments” by the Chinese government and lead a carefree life, in contrast to many poor Chinese families who cannot afford university tuition. Of course, this charge is unfounded, because the self-funded African students have surpassed the Chinese scholarship holders since 2005 and made up 83% of the total population in 2015. [10] In the meantime, xenophobia seems to have spilled over to Whites as well, whose prestige has been declining in the past decade, partly from the widening chances of Chinese’ everyday exposure to them. One of the racial epithets of the white is “white monkey”. Many Caucasian expats are hired in business promotions such as real estate sales in China’s cities in order to create an “international” image. The effect of the commercial ruse is paradoxical, for it presupposes the association of business success with Caucasian faces for the Chinese, but in the meantime damage the reputation of some serious businessmen, because the hired performances of Caucasian expats are seen as monkey shows in the zoo. [11] To the extent that the change of attitude draws on the employment relations and economic status, the perception of expats through the prism of race is laced with snobbery pinpointed by an assertion of Chinese identity thanks to China’s economic ascending. As a consequence, being a Chinese and ‘yellow’ is no longer something embarrassing but worthy championing. This may explain the emergence of a new racial epithet “yellow left” from some microbloggers. The “yellow left”, as Zhang Chenchen (2020) quotes from the answers from zhihu , are “a growing number of elite youngsters in the more developed regions who are out of touch with reality and overflowing with sympathy.” Instead of “white left”, the use of “yellow left” seems to reflect a nuanced identity shift by which the “yellow race” moved up the rung of the racial ladder. And, calling a Chinese compatriot who endorses liberal values as such implies a fiercer denouncement of the latter’s disloyalty despite common racial ground, quintessentially represented by the skin colour. Just as David Gilmore (2009) reveals that any misogynist attitudes entail a tension-ridden state of men, [12] we can see that the coexistence of the repressed “feminine” weakness and a promotion of masculine, martial valour in the usernames of some popular microbloggers (often with 100,000 followers) promoting the anti- narratives. There are usernames stating more explicit political agendas or targeting more specifically at certain groups, such as “anti-black/green spokesman” (green symbolizes Muslims), “Removing multiculturalism”, “Society of Jokes of the Black”, and so on. But the username of the microblogger who reported the volunteering to the police is “helpless benevolence”. Other usernames valorise the ancient military glory of Han Chinese, such as “Han’s battle tiger”, “Heart of the Han’s soul”, “Guangdong governorate-general adjutant”, a military rank of Ming dynasty (1368-1644), and “Yang the sixth”, a legendary marshal of Song dynasty (960-1279) who led his entire clan fighting the Liao (916-1125) army in the northern China. Besides the cultural frenzy and xenophobic rhetoric, the commercialization of the China’s Internet industry cannot be neglected. The topics (hashtags) of some microbloggers are called super-topic ( chaohua ), which is more than an ‘ordinary topic’ that any netizen is free to join and leave his or her comments. One needs to be a member (fan) of a community run by a moderator of the super-topic so that her or his comments of the super-topic is seen by others joining the same super-topic. The moderator, or the microblogger of the super-topic, has to keep the community size stable or expand it by cultivating a consensus and eliminating any disharmony among the community members, for any discordance among members would cause some to leave the community/super-topic. According to the regulation of the platform, the microblogger has to “clock in” and renew their posts daily. Bigger the community, the higher the network flow, more valuable the super-topic community for advertisers, and more the microbloggers can earn. In other words, cyber-politics is driven by profitability. This, of course, leads to enclosures in the public sphere. Just as my conversation with the blogger only ‘feeds the troll’, the troll preys on external dissidents to grow bigger. With the growth of the community of homogeneous minds, even a single word can elicit huge repercussion among its members, such as the black, blue, white, yellow as well as binaries such as left/right, female/male. In this regard, the growth of the hatred narratives just resembles the replication of a single stranded RNA with a number of nucleic acid sequence. Who are the Africans in Guangzhou? If the blacks are encapsulated in a single Chinese character by the microbloggers, then, to what extent does it represent reality? Is it able to account for the complexities of the ‘blacks’ in Guangzhou? Tong Tong market at Sanyuanli. The stores open until 6:30 p.m. In fact, the majority of dark-skinned people in Guangzhou are mainly traders from the continent of Africa, who buy from Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Foshan, and other cities in China. But it is useful to point out that not all Africans are black if we consider people from Maghreb countries and the European descents, and that ‘black’ peoples, as outsiders would foist the colour off on them, may refer to one another as red, coffee, or white on relative basis. African scholar Adams Bodomo traces the exodus of African businessmen to Hongkong and China to the financial crisis in the 1990s. [13] With the passage of time, the African sojourners have gradually transformed the city landscape, to the extent that the business hub they frequent is labelled as ‘chocolate city’. [14] At Sanyuanli, Xiaobei and Taojin (literally Goldrush, I should point out) of Guangzhou, where the metro lines highways converge and make transportation very convenient, Africans gravitate to wholesale malls and a warren of retail shopfronts of clothes, shoes, watches, mobile phones, curtains, ceramic tiles and so on. At the Tong Tong market at Sanyuanli Road (Fig. 1), for instance, an African woman can bargain the price and pick twenty shoes from one stall, and another twenty from the second stall. Then, she can have all the shoes packed and her name marked on the package at the back of the mall. Outside of the mall, a line of trolley men and taxi drivers are waiting, who would pull the packages to storage houses of cargo companies or drive directly to the airport. If she is hungry, she can find several African restaurants run by a few Africans’ Chinese wives serving fufu , the typical staple food made of banana in western African countries, or nsima , the thick, white porridge of corn, to the very palate of Malawian or Eastern Africa nationals. Of course she can go to the MacDonald’s next door, the symbol of globalization, for a quick meal. She can get a local phone number from a counter in the mall, having WeChat and VPN installed by the young man behind the counter in addition to WhatsApp and Facebook on her phone. The young man typically comes from a hinterland province and has worked in an electrical company in the Pearl River Delta or so. The WeChat and VPN, restaurants, hotels, plus money exchange services run by Chinese Muslims, and cargo services and custom companies in the airport laid out the localized business infrastructure for the African traders. Haussa people from Nigerian roaming the streets of Xiaobei, the market opens until midnight. Yet businessmen and women need to build connections and trust. Anyone who does business needs to face many uncertainties, so are the Africans in Guangzhou. Gordon Mathew et al (2017) has offered an all-embracing account of the trade activities of the Africans. One of the common complaints of African is that what they get from the supplier is different from or inferior to what they had ordered, so that it is “better to cry in China than to cry back in Africa”, that is, a careful check of the goods before shipment to Africa. [15] Owing to the language barrier and unmatched expectations, many Chinese consider their African clients “troublesome”. This catch phrase, mafan in Chinese, is readily parroted by Africans in their everyday English. “Too many mafan ”, several businesswomen have complained about their relationship with the Chinese to me. Nevertheless, some Africans and Chinese are wise enough to reduce mafan by binding their business partnership. The story of Namazzi, a Uganda lady is exemplar in this regard. [16] Unlike her home country where foreigners, including Chinese, find business expediency thanks to the “colonial system”, Namazzi tells me that Guangzhou is not an easy place to set up a cargo company because it requires so long a process and so much paperwork. Instead, she hired a Chinese young man from hinterland province to register the company and do the paperwork. She pays the ‘dummy boss’ one thousand dollars a month, and helps him buy a car, so that the boy can run some side business such as driving people to the airport in the evening. “If you work with someone, you must help them also grow”, said Namazzi. Namazzi even makes Chinese friends of the same age set in Guangzhou and hosts their visit to her country. There, she has her countrymen, who lack capital, buy goods on credit from the Chinese shop owners by referring to her name. The Chinese would first call Namazzi to confirm that the Uganda customers know Namazzi in person and say to the customers that if they get the goods on credit, they must ship the goods from China with Namazzi’s cargo. If someone in Uganda does mafan for the Chinese, she or he would just call Namazzi. And Namazzi has many of her mafan solved by Chinese friends in Guangzhou. The business network even takes deeper roots in the Guangzhou soil. Numerous scholarly works have shed light on the interracial marriage, the Igbo men from Nigeria and their Chinese wives in particular, whose unions stabilize the trans-continental business. [17] In the similar vein, religious activities of both African Muslims and Christians in Guangzhou have been localised to some extent. Close to the Guangzhou railway station, the Saad bin Abi Waqas Mosque, a sacred place where the Prophet’s legendary maternal uncle Waqas was buried, becomes a pilgrim to African Muslims. It does not host special service for the participating Africans, but sometimes delivers preaching to its Chinese followers (Hui and Uyghur ethnicities) on keeping good faith and conducting good business with foreigners. The main hall, solemn and tidy, is open for both Chinese, African, Arabs, Pakistanis, and Indian Muslims for meditation. [18] In another mosque, a Malian Muslim leads the worship for both African and Chinese on behalf of the Imam thanks to the Malian’s mastery of Chinese, Arabic, English, and French. Besides his business, he also helped his mosque mates with visa formalities. Indeed, to some extent the churches and mosques serve as the asylums for overstayers, who have long been a headache for Guangzhou Immigration and police. The Malian as a religious broker indeed play a role here, in addition to the Mosque’s provision of food and accommodation to Muslim sojourners, making it a caravanserai in the Guangzhou city. For Christians, one of the now renowned city spectacles is the Sacred Heart Cathedral’s African congregation. Established in 1863, the church’s Sunday mass now offers English service for Africans, mostly Igbo Nigerians. The church used to be open to non-believers, but when I was about to enter the mass, two Nigerians standing at the entrance checked if everyone was Christian, and those who did not give a positive answer were denied access. In the courtyard next to the main hall, a white shelter hosts another mass. Inside it the whole membership is dancing and singing the name of the Lord and Jesus– the effervescent Pentecostal spirit [19] sometimes is eye-opening to the Chinese onlookers. Yet many African Pentecostals told me that the Sacred Heart Cathedral is not their first option, or simply not “their religion”. I joined several Pentecostal congregations through the invitation of my Caribbean and African friends. The first church I attended was run by a Congolese pastor and attended by twenty-plus Africans. When the soundproof door closed behind me and the thick curtain on it was drawn—the room seemed to have adapted from a music studio—the thunderous preaching and the breathless translation by a Ghanaian sitting next to him split one’s ears. One of the gospels of the rhythmised sermon was that with one dollar one deposits in God’s place, he will get three, five, and even twenty in return. But at the end of the service, the pastor said that the conference room rent of 1200 yuan was due. Since the donation he collected from this service was not enough, he would have his assistant call each participant for 100 yuan after the service. The second one, presided by a Kenyan pastor and on a different floor of the same building, was more cordial and homely. Women, including a Chinese lady, were sitting in the front with their children. I remember one of the babies untended by her mom started crawling under people’s legs. She was grabbed by a man sitting at the side of the room when she was too close to the auditorium, and the man gave me an apologizing smile. He turned out to be the baby’s father, who had run a business in Guangzhou for years. The intervals of preaching and dancing were for men to exchange business information, mostly outside of the chamber. Each time the participants are offered food prepared by women, such as curry rice with barbecue drumsticks, and occasionally birthday cakes of the kids of the church members. Later, I attended a third church, which was operated by a Nigerian pastor and his wife. Like the Kenyan pastor, he often used a handkerchief to wipe off the sweat off his brow during his passionate preaching, gesticulation, and gyration back and forth among members. The congregation was asked to read selected passages from the bible, and our souls often awakened by the interrogative shout of the pastor at the face. “Do you understand?!” Besides the pastor’s arduous preaching, there were the collective prayers. I remember that we laid hands for those who kneel down before the pastor in order to lift them up from suffering or weakness of faith, for the enveloped red notes with Chairman Mao’s figure on them in a shining aluminium basket, and for the newly wed. The couple, a Nigerian husband and his Tanzanian wife, nervous yet joyful, received the blessings from the pastor, their parents, and several guest bishops coming from as far as the United States. Heidi Hauge (2013) notes that a ‘reversed evangelism’ prevails in Pentecostal churches in Guangzhou. As Europeans are seen to have abandoned their mission, Africans are given responsibility for evangelizing the Gospel, and China is soon to be won over for God. In light of this creed, China’s prosperity and progress is only the achievement of a worldly nation, and the ordinary Chinese patriotism is merely a display of pomp and pageantry. “Ten more years, and we will no longer remember this place because there will be such a mighty change and shaking.” One pastor in his sermon claimed during China’s sixtieth anniversary in 2009 (ibid). I haven’t heard about the contents alike when I joined these Pentecostal churches. My presence as a Chinese may have impeded pastors to claim so, or that the stringent visa policies have dampened their ambitions over the years. Several Nigerians grudged to me about the 30-day business visa which tight-jacketed their business activities. It takes about 45 days to browse shops and goods, place the order, and wait for the production and then check the quality and design of the goods before shipping them to Africa. The year 2009, they recalled, was a turning point when the local police chased one illegal stayer or two, who jumped out of one building and died of heart attack. [20] The Nigerians and African protested, resulting in only stricter visa policy and the local government’s control over the immigration through discouraging landlords in downtown districts from leasing houses to them. This policy, however, contributes to the scattering of African traders to neighbouring cities, and perhaps putting them in direct contacts with manufacturers. Still, the population of Nigerian community has dropped from some four thousand to five or six hundred, according to the estimate of an Igbo businessman. More illegal entries are under the radar, he tells me, and the mores of Nigerians are corrupted because of transgressions of overstayers or from overstaying itself. Facing such community plight, the pastor warns church attendants to refrain from any illegal activities such as drug trafficking, because the Pentecostal church, where people are bathed in the Holy Spirit, does not allow any evil nor any witchcraft which had been practiced among Igbos. The pastor himself was in a precarious situation, too. He had to renew his visa on an annual basis for the past nineteen years, another Nigerian told me, and he began to seriously consider the option of leaving China for good to America. Beating the bush, and around the Bush Regardless of the levels of interactions of the Africans with locals in Guangzhou, the pastor’s prophecy came brutally true. After the end of 2019, the pandemic hit Wuhan city hard, and then the entire China and the world. A sharp turn of the post-Wuhan pandemic, from domestic view, was the ‘imported cases’ at the border cities and metropolises of China, after the government had implemented aggressive measures to contain the virus. Not only the epicentre Wuhan (from Jan 23 to April 8), other major cities had been locked down for quite a while. Faced the ever-changing situations, local people’s adrenaline roller-coastered. When they just became desensitized, the Guangzhou public security reported an incident on 1st April. A Nigerian businessman, tested positive, bit a nurse’s face when he forced his way from the hospital. Prior to this incident, the Guangzhou CDC [21] announced on 22nd March that immigrants entered Guangzhou after 8thMarch, regardless of their nationality, should self-quarantine for 14 days. The Nigerian entered Guangzhou on 20th March and was tested positive on 23rd March and hospitalized. The CDC traced his contact history, discovering on 2nd April that the hostess of the restaurant he frequented was positive by Nucleic test, so was her husband, and their daughter who had travelled home and a boyfriend of hers were tested positive on 4thApril, too. In that afternoon, all the shops (except pharmacy’s) in that area were ordered to close for 14 days. The next day, the two downtown districts of Guangzhou, Yuexiu and Baiyun, and the Huilai county, where the daughter stayed, escalated to medium-risk areas. [22] Residential distribution of Africans in Guangzhou. This map draws on a survey of a small number of African population in 2018 and shows that they tended to cluster in Guangyuanxi area (upper left) and Xiaobei area (lower right). Blue/brown colours indicate female and male respondents and the signs of moon and cross represent Muslims and Christians respectively. The sifting of African population in Guangzhou began no later than 6th April, when African residents were asked to show their passports, registration forms, and their travel history. Owing to the so-called asymptomatic transmission [23] , all of the people with contact history should be collectively isolated for 14 days in designated facilities and tested at least twice during the isolation. Since the malls in Xiaobei and Sanyuanli were frequented by African buyers, those who reported to have shown up there were ordered to implement collective quarantine, too. Those without contact history with confirmed cases and the marketplaces are ordered to self-quarantine at home. The people who knocked African’s doors involved health workers, translators, and local police with the assistance of sub-district government and neighbourhood community ( shequ ), the grassroots administration assigned with the mission of residential registration and population control. It was less obvious whether the local government used one stone to kill two birds, namely the disease monitoring and the immigration control over illegal entrees and overstayers. [24] But the ways they handle the issue proved clumsily hashed and the consequence disruptive. [25] On April 7th, some Africans became displaced, because they were denied access to their residential community, as evidenced by posts at the entrance of a neighbourhood community. Later news coverage revealed that it started in a hotel, where the Africans refused to stay for another 14-day quarantine because their visa would expire and despite that officials believed that they had stepped out of the hotel. They finally were let out, but ordered by the officials that they should not go back in. [26] Part of the Africans were made homeless, according to a local social worker, because they refused home quarantine as this would ‘limit their freedom’. Agitated, one of them even jumped off his balcony on the third floor. Many more dragged their suitcases, wandering in the city, only to find that malls, restaurants, and buses were closed to them. The homeless Africans video-called home countries, and upon receiving many video clips and messages, a Kenyan independent media wode maya (literally ‘my mom!’, a common Chinese exclamation) with 366,000 subscribers reported this, which followed by thousands of angry comments on boycotting Chinese and Chinese goods in Africa. [27] On the same day, a Guangzhou local was investigated by the police because he spread a rumour which went viral on WeChat a day earlier. He averred that a field hospital would be in place to host the “300,000 black people”, and the entire Guangzhou population would contract the virus shortly. The evicted and those who were ordered to isolate themselves were indignant, questioning why the whites, South Americans, African descents holding US and UK passports or the Chinese wives and children cohabited with them had not been tested nor quarantined; why long-time African residents in Guangzhou had to do nucleic acid test; and why some of them were tested many times without knowing the result, contrary to the promises of the testers. It must be racist, targeting Africans from Africa only, many of my African friends concluded. Yet, upon scrutiny in a month later, I believe the sweeping action was less intentioned than an institutional blunder. The measures meted out by local government through neighbourhood control is key to the understanding of institutional efforts. China used to have a district, sub-district ( jiedao ), and neighbourhood community ( shequ) in its urban governance administrative hierarchy. Now the grid was introduced below the neighbourhood community since the 2000s. A grid is a cluster of households, ranging from 50 in the countryside to 1000 in cities. The grid manager and workers assume jobs assigned from above. During the outbreak of SARS, for instance, Biao Xiang (2020) finds grid managers “visit door to door to check everyone’s temperature, hand out passes which allow one person per household to leave home twice a week and, in the case of collective quarantine, deliver food to the doorstep of all families three times a day… Once the central government declared the war on virus, in no time the entire nation put itself under gridlock.” [28] Starting from April 6th, the local authorities operated in a similar fashion as Xiang portrays. At first there was the banning of Africans entering into their neighbourhood community, followed by the hasty arrangement of collective quarantine in hotels. One of my African friends reported that policemen drove her countrymen at night to quarantine hotels just to avoid public attention. For home-quarantined Africans, neighbourhood community staff began to take care of their daily life, such as ordering food and scheduling the test. The involvement of the police was noticeable in addition to the control from neighbourhood communities. Some policemen were from the Bureau of Public Security in charge of domestic issues. When the eviction took place, a few kind-hearted landlords were willing to offer home-quarantine for Africans, but they were pressured to give up by the policeman, who warned that asymptomatic carriers would put the entire neighbourhood at stake. Other policemen are actually border security enforcement under the newly established Immigration Bureau, whose functions were just separated from the Ministry of Public Security in 2019. Wearing the same uniform as common policemen, these immigration officers hold the power to check visa status and detain overstayers for repatriation. The displaced Africans in the headlines of international media, regardless of their volition to conform or resist, were in fact the ones missed out by the grid work and who, when roaming the street, were captured by patrolling police and sent to hotels for collective quarantine. In other words, the police and neighbourhood community/grid acted together to put Africans in grids according to their respective epidemiological conditions. While eviction was not among their goals, it served as necessary means to control the disease through a combination of handy apparatuses by the government. There was perhaps the institutional embolism. The Public Security or the police system seems less coordinated with the diplomatic line. As revealed by later news coverages, especially a Nigerian reporter’s detailed report, the joint action meted out to African nationals was done without adequate communication with African consulates. The tension culminated at the night of April 9th, when the Acting Consul General of the Nigerian consulate ranted at the Director General of Guangzhou Foreign Affairs Office in front of a hotel, after patrolling van took eleven African nationals (including eight Nigerians, two Cote d’Ivoire nationals and one Benin Republic citizen) whose passports were ‘seized’ by the Chinese at the reception. While whose fault was it is left to the good judgment of the readers, my emphasis is that the scenario was occasioned by confused tongues: when the Nigerian charged that Guangzhou police “harassed” African residents, the Chinese official denied that no one was “arrested”. When the recorded scenario was uploaded to YouTube, many cheered the Nigerian diplomat because he spoke on behalf of all African people and, according to some, should be elected “our president”. The arm crossing of the Chinese and his efforts to calm down his interlocutor, on the contrary, was interpreted as signs of covering up and not responsive to the issue. The day followed witnessed whopping escalation of diplomatic tension, and inhuman became the catchphrase of the diatribe. African ambassadors in Beijing demanded “the cessation of forceful testing, quarantine and other inhuman treatments”, and that “threats of revocation of visas, arrest, detention and deportation of African legal migrants for no cogent reason which infringes on their human rights.” The next day, the Nigerian Speaker of the House of Representatives, laying his mobile phone showing the video of the confrontation between officials in Guangzhou on the table, expressed displeasure over the inhuman treatment when he summoned the Chinese ambassador to Nigeria. [29] The video of the meeting soon appeared on Chinese independent media, and was interpreted by the audience as the ambassador bowing to the Nigerian congressman, a sheer humiliation by the latter, before it was deleted by the webmasters. The charge of China’s inhuman treatment of Africans continued in both the Nigerian media and Twitter of another spokesman of the House of Representative. In a television debate, the guests evoked an image (work) from one of China’s museums, where a picture of a chimpanzee is juxtaposed next to an African (again an dehumanizing action), [30] and suggested a number of retaliations, including sending the illegal Chinese home, the nationalization of Chinese investments, cutting off Chinese loan, and bringing China to the court for causing damage to Nigeria for spreading the virus. * These events all happened in a time when I joined the volunteers to moderate the impacts of local decrees on the Africans in Guangzhou from mid-April to May. Earlier than that, as I got to know later, two Chinese students who had conducted research related to the African diaspora took the initiative of the aid, and many more volunteers, particularly who versed in English and French joined the group. In the meantime, I was bombarded by messages, news, outcries, accusations, debates, from several research networks including both Chinese and African scholars, while texting and calling my previous informants to check on them since I was away in Australia. Some replied, some didn’t. No one had the whole picture, even the number of African expats in Guangzhou, i.e. 4,553 reported by the Guangzhou authority in a briefing on April 12. The number was too exact to be trusted because it varied dramatically from different sources in the past decade, [31] and I know some were hiding in their friend’s places because of the fear for deportation after testing. Some Africans residing in other cities of China and African descents in Guangzhou were acting in the meantime, delivering food and sending money to those forced to quarantine in hotels. The Chinese volunteers had better cooperate with these Africans and possibly African students studying in China, because the two groups are ideal mediators between Chinese authorities and their countrymen. The Africans in quarantine were less likely to be well informed as they relied heavily on their own network. It was the harsh epidemiological control that exposed them to head-on encounters with local police and grassroots government staff who do not speak good English. Even the notice for quarantine was in Chinese. But trust between Chinese and African volunteers was hard to win in such a short notice, especially when the diplomatic tension was already in place. I have no clue how Africans were helping Africans. My best guess is that the Africans and Chinese were digging the tunnel from opposite sides of the hill. Once dismissed Chinese volunteers reassembled, continuing fighting fake news by providing correct information, helping with accommodation and ordering food for the Africans (sometimes from their own pockets) as well as preparing the brochures for the installation of health monitoring code on the mobile phones of the quarantined. Without the code one could not travel to other cities by train or by plane. I joined a group of twenty volunteers, whose leader managed to secure from the local government a list of 200 plus Africans and several Indians and Pakistani collectively quarantined in several hotels. We were each assigned 10 people, making sure that they take the nucleic acid test on the 7th day and the 14th day and report their body temperature daily, as well as addressing their immediate needs and listening to their complaints. Their difficulties vary. A common complaint was locals’ running away in front of them, which was very embarrassing and even traumatic for them. An Ethiopian gentleman’s response was admirable in this regard, for he would stay all day in the hotel room in order not to scare the pedestrians, even though he had a habit of walking after dinner and was suffering from diabetes. An Eastern African businessman complained that no taxi would take him for a test in the designated hospital. Taking for granted that I was in Guangzhou, he texted me that “please come and taste me in my hotel”, a typo which really made us laugh. A Senegalese declined my call in the beginning but sent me his test report upon my request. It was not until I received a phone call from Guangzhou police that I realized that he was suspicious of my identity. Many more are running out of money because the hotel fares were on them, and two women could only afford a meal a day. Sending some money through my WeChat wallet was what I could offer only. Several scholars who had researched the Africans in Guangzhou also worked together in drafting possible solutions to local government to ameliorate the consequences on the Africans, including the provision of humanitarian remedies to those short of money or food regardless of their visa statuses. The government may have underestimated the difficulties in handling the African expats in their jurisdiction, which backfired and triggered diplomatic protests against China when the incident unfolded. However, given that the border is closed and only a few international flights are operating, and that the international NGOs are beyond reach, practically, the local government has to take care of the African expats at the end of the day, and the localization of humanitarian assistance seemed inevitable. [32] We know our proposal has reached a certain level of officials and the government did take some positive steps, but we were not able to get direct feedback because of the bureaucratic procedures. This is how things work in China, to my understanding. Nevertheless, as a Chinese national I was struck by the whopping of Nigerian media and politicians in denouncing China. In the past few years, the country came across to me for conferring noble titles to a few Chinese expats. [33] Though often portrayed as the glory of overseas Chinese by Chinese media, such attainments could not have been achieved without the openness of Nigeria’s society. Besides, to the extent that the Igbo and Hausa in Guangzhou hardly mixed with one another (owing to the entrenched ethnic tension and hatred, a schism may go back to the Nigerian civil war in 1966-1970), how come the whole nation now turns against China? In fact, Nigerian nationals and netizens also mentioned the hospitality of their country towards Chinese as opposed to the maltreatment in Guangzhou. But I discovered the antagonism drew on other anecdotal accounts. On Naraland.com , a popular national forum, a thread stated that the Nigerians had been clean before their departure to China, and that they were tested positive only through injection of virus by Chinese doctors. Another had it that blood tests were made to Nigerians in Guangzhou because Chinese doctors were curious about why the Nigerian genes were so strong to survive Ebola. There is fake news, too. A screenshot of a WeChat dialogue between a Chinese an African was taken as evidence of racial eviction. However, apparently the broken Chinese from the dialogue was awkwardly translated from English. [34] The confidence on Nigerian’s national hygiene capacity and the nation’s genetical robustness crept in, precluding the possibility that Guangzhou authority may have had any justifiable epidemiological considerations. Retaliation at country level is a must, so is the in-time evacuation of suffering nationals caught in Guangzhou. On 31 May, 268 Nigerian nationals were evacuated “over virus and racism” by a flight and from arranged by the Nigerian authority, and all the evacuees will be proceeding on another 14 days quarantine. [35] China’s spokesman of foreign ministry has tried to harmonize the diplomatic relations with African countries by reiterating the principle of “all foreigners are treated equally”, “reject all racist and discriminatory remarks” because “the Chinese people always see in African people partners and brothers through thick and thin”, without specifying who promotes the racism, racial thinking, or racialized domestic and immigrants’ issues. [36] African independent media and politicians and the narrative of English media highlighted China’s eviction, mistreating and dehumanizing of African expats without referring to either the epidemiological situations or the illegal visa status of Africans. The matter of illegality only surfaced when Nigeria brought to the fore the illegality of Chinese expats. Both narratives seem to beat around the bush, while the enforcement of each country were beating the bush where expats were inhabiting. At the end of the day, one’s home country is believed to be the safest and cleanest, while another country is always a hell. Now the Chinese expats in several African countries are appealing for evacuation arranged by the Chinese government, particularly after the murder of three Chinese in Zambia on 24th May, a tragedy which is allegedly associated with the Mayor of Lusaka’s crusade of a number of downtown Chinese businesses who denied access to locals and were labelled as discriminatory. [37] To quote the Indian scholar Arundhati Roy writing on the pandemic, “the lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things.” [38] But in the case of African expats in Guangzhou and its aftermath, the pandemic is illuminating and shadowing at the same time. The local authority’s harsh measures and the immigrants’ suffering are exposed to the spotlight of the media. In contrast, both discourses of the nation-states portraying themselves as the ardent protectors of their citizens, and the cyberspace narratives celebrating unadulterated ethno-racial identity, have concealed the everyday experience of the African businessmen and their interactions with local Chinese. It was a blend of painstakingness, liveliness and entrepreneurship despite many restraints. If there is any “wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years”, [39] it is the fragility embedded in the low-end globalization [40] which has never gained legitimacy in the globalizing fad before the pandemic. Indeed, the pandemic has just reversed the flow of globalization, leaving international immigrants stranded, who are still struggling hard to gain the protection from their respective countries and securing a ticket of return flight. Berhanu is an anthropologist in African Studies. [1] Jenni Marsh, Shawn Deng and Nectar Gan. 2020. “Africans in Guangzhou are on edge, after many are left homeless amid rising xenophobia as China fights a second wave of coronavirus”. April 11 (updated on April 13). CNN news. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/10/china/africans-guangzhou-china-coronavirus-hnk-intl/index.html . [Accessed: 6 June 2020] [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinesehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese [4] Cheng Yinghong. 2018. “White-lefties and the traitor of the Han: The Other within the Nation-state.” Available at: https://www.chinesepen.org/blog/archives/117560 . [Accessed: 10 June 2020]. [5] Zhang Chenchen. 2020. “Right-wing populism with Chinese characteristics? Identity, otherness and global imaginaries in debating world politics online.” European Journal of International Relations vol. 26(1): pp. 88-115. [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement [7] The earliest account of the African students’ experience in China see Immanuel Hevi, 1963. An African Student in China. London: Pall Mall Press. [8] Winslow Robertson. 2020. “A brief history of anti-black violence in China.” Available at: https://africasacountry.com/2020/05/a-brief-history-of-anti-black-violence-in-china Also Barry Sautman. 1994. Anti-Black Racism in Post-Mao China. The China Quarterly. vol 138. pp. 413-437. [9] Li, Anshan. 2018. “African Students in China: Research, Reality, and Reflection.” African Studies Quarterly. vol. 17(4). pp. 5-44. There were 61,594 African students out of 442,773 international students in 2016. [10] Ibid. [11] Alice Yan. 2017. “White people wanted: a peek into China’s booming ‘rent a foreigner’ industry.” June 10. South China Morning Post. Available at: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2096341/white-people-wanted-peek-chinas-booming-rent-foreigner-industry . [12] Gilmore, David D. 2009. Misogyny: The Male Malady: University of Pennsylvania Press. [13] Adams Bodomo. 2012. Africans in China. Cambria Press: Amherst, New York. [14] Bill Schiller. 2009. Big Trouble in China’s Chocolate City. The Star. 1 Aug. Available at: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2009/08/01/big_trouble_in_chinas_chocolate_city.html [Accessed: 6 June 2020]. See also Pan, Chinglin and Ding Yuan. 2013. “Chocolate City as a Concept and as Visible African Space of Change and Diversity.” In Z. Huang and J. Zhang (eds.) Discussions on Socio-economic Transition: Urbanisation, Industrialization and Cultural Survival in China. Intellectual Property Publishing House, pp. 47-78. [15] Mathews Gordon, Linessa Dan Lin, Yang Yang. 2017. The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London. p.88. [16] I used pseudonyms to protect the identity of interviewees. I am grateful to Ms. Genis for her kind assistance with the access and interviews and many discussions. [17] Qiu, Yu. 2016. Cleanliness and Danger: Destigmatisation and Identity Politics in Nigerian-Chinese Intimate Relationships in South China. Open times. vol. 4. pp. 88-107. [18] Mathews Gordon, Linessa Dan Lin, Yang Yang. 2017. The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London. p. 167. [19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentecostalism [20] Bill Schiller. 2009. Big Trouble in China’s Chocolate City. The Star. 1 Aug. Available at: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2009/08/01/big_trouble_in_chinas_chocolate_city.html [Accessed: 6 June 2020]. [21] http://www.chinacdc.cn/en/ [22] Guangzhou Municipal Health Commission. 2020. “Updates on the Risk levels of the Epidemiological Conditions of Guangzhou Districts.” April 6. Guangzhou Municipal Health Commission webpage. Available at: http://wjw.gz.gov.cn/ztzl/xxfyyqfk/yqtb/content/post_5759569.html [Accessed: 6 June 2020] [23] Xinhua News Agency. 2020. “What is asymptomatic carriers, and how to discover them?” April 1. Available at: http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2020-04/01/c_1210540120.htm . [Accessed: 6 June 2020] [24] Police raid see Mathews Gordon, Linessa Dan Lin, Yang Yang. 2017. The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London. pp. 124-125. [25] I establish the timeline of the incident from a number of sources including my African friends, local social worker, several volunteers, and both Chinese and English news reports. [26] Ikenna Emewu. 2020. “Guangzhou: Exclusive full report of the face-off, maltreatment allegation of Africans in China.” Africa China Press Centre. April 24. Available at: https://africachinapresscentre.org/2020/04/24/guangzhou-exclusive-full-report-of-the-face-off-maltreatment-allegation-of-africans-in-china/ [Accessed: 6 June 2020] [27] Mr Ghanababy. 2020. “Chinese Discriminate Africans Because Of Covid-19?”. April 7. Available at: https://youtu.be/qCea1oIKpc0 [28] Xiang, Biao. 2020. “From Chain Reaction to Grid Reaction: Mobilities & Restrictions during SARS & Coronavirus” Available at: https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/2020/from-chain-reaction-to-grid-reaction-mobilities-restrictions-during-sars-coronavirus/ [29] Chukwunanuekpere. 2020. “Video: Gbajabiamila attacks Chinese Ambassador over treatment of Nigerians in China.” iBrandTV. April 11. Available at: https://ibrandtv.com/video-gbajabiamila-attacks-chinese-ambassador-over-treatment-of-nigerians-in-china/ [30] Plus TV Africa. 2020. “House of Rep Seeks Investigation on Validity Of Chinese Nationals In Nigeria.” May 1. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1hhImz-jSE [31] Pan, Chinglin and Ding Yuan. 2013. “Chocolate City as a Concept and as Visible African Space of Change and Diversity.” In Z. Huang and J. Zhang (eds.) Discussions on Socio-economic Transition: Urbanisation, Industrialization and Cultural Survival in China. Intellectual Property Publishing House, pp. 47-78. [32] I draw the concept from Alexander Betts, Evan Easton-Calabria and Kate Pincock. 2020.“The Localisation of Humanitarian Assistance as a Response to COVID-19.” Available at: https://www.kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au/publication/localisation-humanitarian-assistance-response-covid-19 . [Accessed: 10 June 2020] [33] BBC Africa. 2019. “Chinese trader gets Nigerian title.” April 29. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2314554302155058 [34] Available at: https://www.nairaland.com/5787867/ask-me-anything-issues-rumor [35] Felix Tih. 2020. “China: 260+ Nigerians evacuated over virus, racism.” May 31. Available at: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/china-260-nigerians-evacuated-over-virus-racism/1859494 [36] China Foreign Ministry. “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian’s Remarks on Guangdong’s Anti-epidemic Measures Concerning African Citizens in China.” April 12. Available at: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/2535_665405/t1768779.shtml [37] “Chinese businessmen murders stir tensions in Zambia.” May 28. The Strait Times. Available at: https://www.straitstimes.com/world/africa/chinese-businessmen-murders-stir-tensions-in-zambia [38] Arundhati Roy. 2020. “The pandemic is a portal”. Financial Times. April 4. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca [39] Ibid. [40] Mathews Gordon, Linessa Dan Lin, Yang Yang. The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London. Previous Next

About educational program Introduction of program 2018-2022 Due to the lack of formal education related to curatorial and artistic work in the Balkan region (while in the former West there has been a proliferation of MA and PhD programmes in curating and artistic research), WCSCD was initiated with the goal of fostering the new generation of curators and artists as well as to raise awareness of the importance of curatorial and artistic knowledge and positions when thinking of art institutions and their role within the larger social context. The intention is to bring together key international and local figures engaged in decolonizing curatorial and artistic discourse, who are specifically able to offer diverse knowledges to the program participants. Through the program, we invite mentors from non-western contexts, local practitioners and also colleagues from the former West. In the last three years our participants were young practitioners from different parts of the world including the Balkans, EU, Asia, Central Asia, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America making it a unique program in Europe. Due to very limited funding structures for the arts within Serbia, funding of the program was dependent on the support of cultural institutions. The program has also charged a participation fee in line with the monthly salary of the country from which the participants is a passport holder. This was an attempt to generate more equal access to participation for everyone who applied. We also offer special grants for colleagues in need and in 2022 we have granted program access to the colleagues from Russia. Furthermore, in collaboration with Kadist Foundation in 2022 we have enable grant for practitioners from the region in order to participate in the program. The program is intensive, with daily programs of workshops, writing sessions, studio visits, and research trips in the region. Some of the research trips we have done so far include: Kosovo, Bosnia, Romania, Slovenia and Austria. Every year the program would accept up to 15 participants. Besides closed-door workshops for participants, all invited mentors would present public lectures to the larger cultural sector, sharing their ways of working and instituting. From 2023 educational program will be biennial and spread across two years in order to facilitate deeper and longer research of program participants. < Educational Program Participants >

WHAT COULD SHOULD CURATING DO I would like to start this session with question What Could/Should Curating Do We propose this question in order to engage with practices and encourage curating to stay dynamic and responsive in the world around me, anchored in caring with . We understand curatorial practice as walking with . We mean walking not as a way of getting somewhere, but walking with , as sharing time and creating space for unevenness to co-exist. When writing about walking, Canadian geographer Juanita Sundberg separates this into two steps. The first step is positioning that i believe you already did in first part, which is locating my body-knowledge in relation to the existing paths I know and walk. Sundberg defines the second step as walking with . “Walking with means ‘reciprocal respect for the autonomy and independence of organizations’ involved in the struggle; in other words, respect for the multiplicity of life worlds. Step two, then, involves learning to learn about multiplicity.” BLOCK 2.1 An input for this task is provided by Biljana Ciric, WSCSD program initiator. Intro We understand curating as caring with or walking with. It doesn't only reflect curatorial work. These prompts may help you to approach the topic: Can you define how you care through your practice? Caring with / caring for/ caring below? how does you care influence the future Whose vision of the future you are living in? What could you do? Thinking about deep time? How? What would you like to have as your legacy? Task Through this exercise try to build connections of your practice of care and relationships you are entangled with. You can use your own writing format or you can use the format that we propose. Make your first steps by finishing sentences "I care for/ with/ about/ beyond _______" Try to think of your life but also your practice as part of your everyday through writing. If writing is not your format of expression then use another format of comfort for 10 minutes. Additional materials Listen to “Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung” podcast by AHALI Conversations w/ Can Altay https://www.ahali.space/episodes/episode-15-bonaventure Read the “Dispatch” conceptual score by Candice Hopkins and Raven Chacon https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/unsettling-scores/dispatch Self-feedback Did the notion of ‘care’ change or unfold in an unexpected way during this exercise? What appeared to be most problematic to formulate? Why? BLOCK 2.2 Intro How care is performed through the institutional structure you are entangled with? What are possible practices of care through institutions? What could you do within these structures? How can an institution perform deep time in its practice of care? We continue this exercise on care asking you to map some of your aspects reflected in personal writing in relation to care and the way it could be affecting larger social/political contexts. Task We would like to invite you to do this as a collective exercise with other peers in the program. Below is the link to a collective Miro board. We propose you to start filling it. Put main tags you came up with during individual exercise. Take some time and see what others add. If the map is not empty - initially place your tags in relation to others. Connect the tags, add questions and comments that occur during their juxtaposition. Access collective Miro map Self-feedback Did the inputs of other participants open new ways for thinking/ questioning for you? What were the hardest parts in mapping? What do you feel is still most problematic?

Events Lecture Series Participant Activities What is The Use? Needs and Means of Making Biennials Under Pandemic | WCSCD 2020/21 Annual Lecture Series The curatorial program What Could/Should Curating Do is proud to be continued in 2021 with public program through lecture series The sixth talk in the 2020/21 series is titled: “What is The Use? Needs and Means of Making Biennials Under Pandemic” A talk/walk through Prizren in preparation of Autostrada Biennale with Övül Ö. Durmusoglu and Joanna Warsza Date: February 5, 2020 Time: 12:00 pm Belgrade / 10:00 pm Melbourne / 07:00 pm Shanghai / 6:00 am New York Venue: zoom link Meeting ID: 985 237 3109 Live stream/Facebook link Credit: A research for Autostrada Biennale, National Library of Kosovo, 2020 “The presentation takes form of a walk live from our second research trip to Prizren under continuing lockdown. Times of challenge for humanity’s unsustainable habits, patterns of living and producing on the planet have arrived. In this ongoing pandemic experience, the formats of content production in contemporary art, especially large-scale exhibitions called biennales need to rethink themselves. While art and culture should remain on the life necessities agenda, our questions and claims as curators need to find a down-to-earth resonance with current needs, limits and means. After ‘Die Balkone’, a public art initiative in windows and balconies of Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, Övül and Joanna welcomed the invitation by the very young Autostrada Biennial initiated by two artists and an educator in Kosovo. The onsite conversations with artists, writers, cultural producers, activists, politicians lead to projects and stories in need of being heard; which motivated the working question around ‘two ends of the road and mutual needs’. Therefore, the biennale will not be cancelled but rooted locally in what we call ‘intimate infrastructure’. As we take the viewers on a walk “What is The Use?”, we will talk about the concept of biennale as resistance and the upcoming Autostrada Biennale as a journey where tools of care and unpredictability are part of their emergency kit on the road trip to the present, from Berlin to Kosovo and back. Or somewhere in between”. Joanna Warsza and Övül Ö. Durmusoglu co-curate Die Balkone in Berlin in 2020 and 2021, and Autostrada Biennale in Kosovo in summer 2021. Foto: Christian Lohse About Speaker Övül Ö. Durmusoglu is mentor and program co-leader in the Graduate School in University of the Arts in Berlin and a visiting professor for Art and Discourse in University of the Arts Braunschweig. In her multifaceted practice as curator, writer and educator, she researches intersectional forms and narratives of contemporary political subjectivities. Övül was one of the curators for the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz; curator/director for YAMA public screen in Istanbul; artistic director for the Sofia Contemporary 2013 ‘Near, Closer, Together: Exercises for a Common Ground’. She curated different programs for the 10th, 13th and 14th Istanbul Biennials; coordinated and organized different programs and events at Maybe Education and Public Programs for dOCUMENTA (13). Joanna Warsza is a Program Director of CuratorLab at Konstfack University of Arts in Stockholm, and an independent curator interested in how art functions politically and socially outside the white cubes. She was the Artistic Director of Public Art Munich 2018, curator of the Georgian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, head of public programs for Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg and an associate curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale among others. She is an editor of more than ten publications in the areas of public art, politics, performativity and feminist theory. Lately she co-edited with Michele Masucci and Maria Lind, Red Love, a Reader on Alexandra Kollontai (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020). WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? (WCSCD) WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? (WCSCD) was initiated and funded in 2018 in Belgrade as an educational platform around notions of curatorial. From 2020 WCSCD started to initiate its own curatorial inquiries and projects that should unpack above -mentioned complexities keeping educational component as a core to the WCSCD. The WCSCD curatorial program and series of public lectures have been initiated and organized by Biljana Ciric. WCSCD 2020/2021 public program series has been done in collaboration with Division of Arts and Humanities, Duke Kunshan University and they co-stream all public lectures. Strategic media collaboration is done with Seecult and they will co-host all public lecture series. Project Partners Media Partner For more information about the program, please refer to www.wcscd.com Project contacts: what.could.curating.do@gmail.com Follow us: FB: @whatcscdo Instagram: @whatcouldshouldcuratingdo < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >

VERNACULAR GESTURES AND EMBODIED KNOWELDGE “…intelligence is not located in any body part but is distributed throughout the entire field of relations comprised by the presence of the human being in the inhabited world.” (“Feet, footwork, footwear and ‘being alive’ in the modern school” by Dr Catherine Burke, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge) A focus of a contemporary art system on the notions of ‘contemporary’ often disregards vernacular practices that actually connect us to personal and collective history, open space for rooted knowledge of peoples and territories and give a perspective for conscious action for the future. By introducing to contemporary art thinking and art practice the notions of indigenous and embodied knowledge, we encourage you to find inspiration in learning by doing, to redefine the meaning of failure and establish connections with vernacular practices of you region and/or family. BLOCK 3.1 An input for this task is provided by Biljana Ciric, WSCSD program initiator. Intro Look closely into your surroundings. Where is the vernacular around you? Do you live near a village, a rural area, an ethnographic museum? Do you have something crafted in your apartment? List your findings ______________ ______________ ______________ ______________ ______________ Now look at what you’ve got in your closest social strata. Are there practices in your family that are vernacular? Ask your senior family members. We encourage you to trace these vernacular gestures, learn about them. Task Choose a vernacular practice and trace it backwards and forwards. Where did it come from? How is it preserved today? Is it evolving? Is it affected by technology? Are there contemporary artists / practitioners trying to reactualise it? Compose your research into a presentation. Additional materials Listen to “Futurefarmers” podcast by AHALI Conversations w/ Can Altay Read an article “Feet, footwork, footwear and ‘being alive’ in the modern school” by Dr Catherine Burke, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge Self-feedback Reflect on your research. Do you feel inspired, happy, sad or devastated on how this vernacular practice lives through today? Expand your thoughts on how indigenous practices should be maintained, implemented in contemporary life. BLOCK 3.2 Together with artist and curator Anastasia Albokrinova we encourage you to look closer into your habitual practices and let a vernacular gesture pass through your body and affect your thinking. Intro How are the habits of a body shaped by digital reality? In which ways grasping a vernacular practice can expand your body consciousness? What practices of commonness are developed through the embodied knowledge? How does an embodied knowledge transform into ‘knowing'? This task offers you to focus on a particular vernacular practice of your choice and trace the process of learning in a diary. It also questions the means of transmission, both acquiring and passing the knowledge forward. Task Choose a vernacular practice you would like to grasp. If you can't think of something - make a bread or cook something according to your family recipe. Create a diary: make notes on the ways you learn, what you notice on the way. Think about failure. What does it mean - to fail? How failure can be a driving force for learning and creativity? After doing a vernacular gesture, transmit it to one more person. Additional materials Listen to a podcast “Foragers” with Jumana Manna, created by “Docs in Orbit” Listen to a podcast of your choice from the podcast series “Promise No Promises!” by Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in Basel Self-feedback Take a moment to reflect on your body: what inspirations, fatigues did you experience? What gestures did you grasp, how did they evolve in the process of learning? How would you describe the knowledge you have acquired?

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< Back THE DANGER OF AMBITION AND NEGLECT The Case of Beautifying Sheger 30 Dec 2020 Sinkneh Eshetu, Aziza Abdulfetah Busser & Berhanu I. Introduction Comparing the current prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmad, to his predecessors, Briuk Terrefe writes: “Abiy Ahmed’s two megaprojects [the 36-hectare luxury real estate complex (LaGare) backed by the Abu-Dhabi-based Eagle Hills, as well the 56 km river-bank restoration project, Beautifying Sheger ] represents a clear ideological rupture from EPRDF [1] and its political priorities, while at the same [time] continuing the long Ethiopian lineage of overly ambitious plans, as well as highly centralized and top-down mechanisms of delivery.” [2] This places the subject of this research within the wider context of “political rupture” and societal change. Regardless of whether one agrees with his analysis or not, we can be sure that the urban fabric of Addis Ababa is about to undergo a dramatic change. It has been consistently observed around the world that such rapid and large-scale transformations are disruptive to people’s lives (particularly to the economically disadvantaged) and the natural environment. Beautifying Sheger , which aspires to create a city-scale public space by transforming the neglected and polluted rivers of Addis Ababa [3] will inevitably disrupt the ecosystem, as well as the livelihood of thousands and over a century of collective cultural memory. This is the case our team is working on as part of the research-based art project, As You Go … The Road Under Our Feet Towards a New Future . For an apt treatment of a project of such a scope, we began with the cultural landscape as the conceptual framework of our research. Using this framework allows us to see the integration of natural and cultural heritage conservation at a landscape level, rather than at a site-level. This encourages us to give due consideration to the landscape; its historical scale; and the connectivity between people, places, and cultural objects. It also enables us to recognise that the current landscape is the product of long-standing and complex interrelationships between people and the environment. [4] When we began this project, we had three major objectives. The first was to investigate the impact of the project on the ecosystem, and on the memory and livelihood of the people, focusing on gardeners along the rivers who use the river water, though polluted, for irrigation. Another objective was to explore alternative designs for [a] sustainable culture-nature fit by reviewing literature on international trends, experiences, and better practices in urban river rehabilitation or re-naturalization. The final (but not the least) objective was sensitising authorities and the public to the probable impact of the current design and construction process on the people and ecosystem through public engagement. Abstracted images of the rivers targeted in the Beautifying Sheger River Development Project [5] . However, as our research progressed, mediated by the tele-conferences among the partners (cells) of the As You Go … project, another important issue came to the fore. Landscape architectures is often regarded as an external manifestation of the inner landscape of a society. The realisation of the designer’s vision and ideals is a process that encompasses conceptualisation, design, implementation, and management – therefore, the cultural background, experience, and philosophy of the designer(s) must be a significant consideration. Alongside this, the participation of the public, professionals and non-professions alike, becomes paramount in a project of this scale. As we began our research, we learned that the initial landscape design of the Beautifying Sheger riverside development, used in the promotional video released by the PM’s office and Addis Ababa City Administration, is not being implemented. Instead, a new design developed by a Chinese landscape architect for the pilot project is now underway. Moreover, the construction of the pilot phase of the project, which was originally awarded to an Addis-based construction company, Varnero, in February 2019, was subsequently withdrawn. It was given to the China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) after the Chinese government agreed to fund the project following PM Abiy’s debt rescheduling negotiations at the Belt and Road Forum in April 2019. [6] Local professionals are now only involved as private consultants in the construction process. As a result, analysing the conceptualisation of the design, labour relationships, and use of technology in the construction process, as well as the role of China in the future management of the designed landscape, has now become an additional objective. II. Background of the Study Area 1. Historical Overview The history of Addis Ababa is important to understand in order to begin to comprehend the layers of collective and cultural memory; the spirits of places; the spatial patterns; the ecological links; the contested interests; the impacts of change, and the direct and indirect recipients of the impact. Unlike other cultures, such as Egypt, who built their cities and civilization along rivers, Ethiopia does not have any cities near its major rivers. Even the establishment of the youthful Bahir Dar, which lies in close proximity to Lake Tana and River Abai (the Nile), is arguably not dependent on these waters. Addis Ababa is no exception. Its establishment and growth are not principally driven by its rivers – though interestingly, it was one of its hot-springs that offered the initial impetus for the city’s foundation and ended the shifting of Ethiopian capitals. In 1886, the wife of King Menelik, Queen Tayitu, camped at the Filwuha hot spring. Preferring the warmth of [the] Finfine plains to the windy and cold hill of Entoto, she decided to build a house to the north of the spring. With this humble beginning, Ethiopia’s capital would soon shift downhill, and in 1906, it changed its name from Entoto to Addis Ababa (translating to: New Flower). Menelik’s generals were given encampments (sefers), interspaced by long distances, to settle in the new capital with their army and relatives. As a military strategy, both the emperor and his generals preferred hills to river valleys and floodplains. Most of the spaces along these unplanned settlements would gradually be filled with similarly unplanned neighbourhoods – particularly near the rivers of the newly forming city, which was left for the slum-like settlements of Addis Ababa’s poor. Emperor Haile Selassie (1892-1975) eventually introduced a diligent planning and provision of infrastructures. The Italian occupants, who interrupted the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie for five years (1936-1941), brought about further planning and construction, and contributed to the development of riverside gardening by building micro-dams for irrigation. When the socialist Derg (1974-1987) made land ownership public, many of the riverside settlements and farms consequently became public property. To this day, they remain mostly owned by woredas/District. Addis Ababa was not built on Terra Nullius (No One’s Land). [7] It is surrounded and preceded by farming communities, and historically and religiously important heritages. This is particularly the case with Entoto, where centuries-old ruins of buildings and rock-hewn churches abound. Though professionally studied literature on these ruins are lacking, some believe that they are related to the fabled city, Barara, referred to in the chronicle of Ahmad Gragn (1506 – 1543). Working within our framework of cultural landscape, the city’s long history will also be considered to explore whether its heritage, which enhances the spirit of places (genius loci) within the project area and offers alternative narratives, is capitalized on and integrated into the new landscape design of Beautifying Sheger. Some of the remains of ancient buildings on Entoto Hill, showing a long history of settlement(Credit: Sinkneh Eshetu, 2014) 2. Characteristics of the Addis Ababa Rivers Addis Ababa’s rivers have hydrological and morphological properties that make their development challenging. The rapid expansion of the city added another layer of complexity to this challenge. The nature of the rivers’ network, elevation differences, soil characteristics, hydrological systems, and their geology gives the rivers of Addis Ababa unique characteristics and irregular behaviour as they pass through the different parts of the city. The river network is estimated to cover about 54 kms and passes through almost all neighbourhoods. As a result, the human-river interaction – the social, cultural and economic attachment between the rivers and the city dwellers – is significant. The rivers’ characteristics, which differs from site to site, highly affects the day to day life of the majority of its inhabitants. The elevation difference between the highest point (Hill Entoto) and the lowest (Akaki catchment) is more than 900m within a distance of about 27 kms. The resulting slope, combined with the riverbank width, results in a rapid flow rate. Favoured by the topography, this rapid flow makes many places adjacent to the rivers prone to flooding. In addition to the overall altitude difference, the riverbanks have different sectional views adapted to the local topography. There are also areas with unstable edges, characterized by an accumulated layer of thick top soil. Due to the fact that the volume of water in the river significantly increases during the rainy seasons, such soft edges are the most susceptible areas for landslide accidents. The diverse bank characteristic of Addis Ababa Rivers (Source: Google Earth Pro. Picture taken 12, 2016. Retrieved on 12/03/2020 from 23:21 to 12:08 AM) 3. The Role of China in the Design, Construction and Management As stated earlier, the construction of the pilot project of Beautifying Sheger is contracted to China Communications Construction Company (CCCC). CCCC commenced the first phase in October 2019 and completed it by the end of August 2020. It outsourced the second phase to the Nantong 3rd Construction Company for another 14-month long construction. Echoing the significance of the project to PM Abiy’s administration, both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Commerce of China rate [it] as their “No. 1” international project and one of their key foreign aid projects. [8] Since its commencement, PM Abiy, high-rank officials, and many generals are among the frequent visitors to the construction site. One of the state leaders even volunteered to explain the project details to other site visitors – allegedly, he even has a watchtower built near the PM residence to check on the progress of the construction. [9] PM Abiy visits the construction site. Source: http://www.zgzjwx.org/detail/2d0kjg.html The diplomatic and political significance of the Sheger project requires an enormous coordination and mobilisation of resources from China’s side. Accordingly, the Ministry of Commerce has prioritised an allocation of funds to this project. China’s ambassador to Ethiopia, Tan Jian, and CCCC higher management have managed to coordinate the logistics of materials to the site, as well as human resources and equipment from 20 other construction projects in Ethiopia. The staff members from China’s Urban Construction Academy and the primary designer stationed themselves at the site of the podium and worked overnight to solve emerging issues. The CCCC engineers are said to have shortened the production of executable blueprints from several months to only 15 days. With scant information from the CCCC, we nevertheless try to offer a portrait of the project based on literature, open resources, and past research experiences. The negotiation, mobilisation, and construction process of the Sheger project – which like many other megaprojects, underlies the famous “Chinese speed” – has domestic roots, though it evolved in international contexts. Since the 1990s, Chinese construction companies have become accustomed to the harmonised government–construction consortia relations that they cultivated domestically. [10] Winning a government contract – and support – is critical for the smooth implementation of projects (and projects in these international contexts, at times even offset Chinese companies’ unfamiliarity to local cultural and legal conditions.) [11] Design blueprint of Phase I. source: http://www.zgzjwx.org/detail/2d0kjg.html Taking Ethiopia as an example, we may consider the nature of large overseas projects the Chinese has been involved with before the Belt and Road initiative. China’s presence within the country goes back to the 1970s, when Emperor Haile Selassie and PM Zhou Enlai signed a project to build a 300km long gravel road in the Amhara region. The year 1997 witnessed the first Chinese company entering the Ethiopian construction market building the Addis Ababa ring road. Like elsewhere in Africa, the infrastructural developments Chinese companies have been involved in, though termed as an aid project in the PRC’s documents, are in fact projects tied to the resources or revenue of the recipient countries. They mainly filled the gap left by traditional donors who shifted away from infrastructure to humanitarian aid. [12] In the case of Sheger, the nature of the contract is on an EPC basis according to a Chinese subcontractor to CCCC. An EPC project means that the engineering, procurement, and construction responsibilities fall on the constructor. While this allows the constructor to streamline and integrate processes at their discretion – in this case, turning to a top-down mobilisation and coordination of human and material resources from China (80% of the total) and other CCCC projects in Ethiopia – such “turn-key” projects keep local input to a minimum. In case of Beautifying Sheger , both the designer and site supervisor are from China’s Urban Construction Academy rather than Ethiopian consultant companies. As a result of the closed nature of the project, our requests to interview Chinese staff members have been politely declined. The mobilisation mode of the construction giant CCCC is exemplar among China’s state-owned enterprises, which often uphold discipline and sacrifice for collective purposes – a socialist working ethos, with its pedigree from the Stakhanov movement in the Soviet Union. In another project contracted to a Chinese Special Operatives Executive (SOE) in Addis Ababa, whenever VIPs or political leaders (both Ethiopian and Chinese) are about to visit the construction site, engineers and workers have to conduct shock work, and their performance and preparedness are linked to opportunities for promotion. In other words, both the management and engineers are directed by a mix of collectivism and career instrumentalism. Many overseas projects of Chinese construction companies hire skilled domestic workers through labour companies, however, skilled Chinese labourers are still favoured by Chinese companies, or occupy a higher niche than local labourers, because of their familiarity with Chinese technical standards (Ethiopians follow EU, US, or Ethiopian standards) and the ease of communication in Chinese. Many Chinese workers are from rural areas, or are the second generation of so-called peasant workers, who gravitate to foreign countries because they can earn a much higher salary and [can] subsequently buy an apartment in China’s cities. [13] Carrying their parents’ puritan work ethic, these workers remain quite adaptable to the intense workloads overseas, in the hope that they may climb up the social ladder in Chinese society. Thanks to the nature of the EPC contract, the integrated supply chain; the mobilisation model (characteristic of the overseas project of the SOEs); and the incentive structure of the Chinese management and workforce all contribute to the everyday progress of the project. Biruk Terrefe argues that the Beautifying Sheger project represents a form of urban aesthetics targeting urban elites, the Ethiopian diaspora, and tourists; and that there exists the operational continuity of planning centralisation. [14] The quick accomplishment of the project will no doubt be a positive political asset to PM Abiy Ahmed, but it also represents the enormous power of states and a triumph of their collective hyper-modern imagination of grandeur, minimalism, and speed. It is unavoidable that local expertise; the complexity of the riverside landscape; the livelihood and memories of the inhabitants; and the nature and ecology of the Addis rivers are all sidestepped and silenced. III. THE PROJECT: BEAUTIFYING SHEGER 1. Existing Condition of the Rivers Over a century of neglect and mismanagement made the Addis rivers a site of informal settlement, landfills and open defecation, outlets of domestic sewers and factory pollutants, deeply eroded gullies and high retention walls, and wild vegetation. Meanwhile, important infrastructures such as waste and storm water lines, roads, bridges, powerlines, and telecom cables criss-cross them. Our site visit to the parts of the river targeted in the pilot project reveals that there are still urban farms using polluted water for irrigation, with informal and formal settlements often precariously hanging off the deep gullies. The current state of the rivers targeted in the pilot project of Beautifying Sheger, clockwise: informal settlement side to side with modern buildings, urban farm, high retention wall and landfills (Picture: Sinkneh Eshetu, 2020) Other than during the rainy seasons, the water in the rivers is not actually natural water but rather, domestic sewer and factory releases. In the rainy seasons, which only happens twice a year, the rivers often overflow at some points, causing flooding hazards. Researches have shown that the storm water which heavily contributes to the seasonally rising rivers is increasing with the growing urbanisation that creates impervious surfaces. [15] Parts of the rivers run through enclosed culverts for long distances, intensifying the pressure of the water downstream. The rivers pose a high risk to public health and wellbeing, which only continues to grow with the rapidly increasing buildings and population that have no provisions of fitting infrastructure and services. One of the results of the unplanned development of Addis Ababa is the co-existence of slum dwellers with the urban fluent. In recent years, there has been a rapid makeover of the face of Addis, which often involves the displacement of slum residents. The riversides are no exception. Modern buildings and high rises are rapidly encroaching these places, often buying out and dislocating people, building more concrete embankments, and further contributing to the liquid and solid waste. Unlike these ad hoc changes, Beautifying Sheger targets the entire river system and promises to mitigate the negative impacts posed by the former. Most likely encouraged by the rising land value (following the transformation of the rivers with the riverside development project), new buildings are sprouting along the river. This further transforms the existing ecosystem, urban fabric, and sub-culture. New buildings along a street near the newly built Friendship Square. (Picture: Sinkneh Eshetu, 2020). 2. Earlier Efforts at Riverside Development The effort to clean and beautify Addis Ababa’s rivers is not new. An independent office, Addis Ababa Rivers and River side Development Project Office, was also established in early months of 2016 ( addisstandard , March 6, 2019 ). Other organizations, such as Addis Ababa Environment Protection Authority (1995), Addis Ababa Beautification, Parks and Cemetery Development Agency (2009), Forum for Environment Ethiopia (1997) and Tena Kebena (1993), have also been trying to clean the landfills and create public spaces near the rivers. However, these sporadic efforts failed to explicitly target to clean the rivers of their pollution sources or connect the entire river system in series of green spaces, which Beautifying Sheger promises to do. Earlier efforts at restoring the river bank, an area part of the pilot project (Pictures: Sinkneh Eshetu, 2020). 3. The Current Project: Concept Note, Design and Construction According to the project Concept Note, Addis Ababa City Riverside Green Development (May 18, 2019), the project aims to: make the river watershed clean and healthy, create public spaces along the rivers, and increase the green space in the city. It plans to achieve this through concrete embankments along the rivers; erosion and runoff control structures wherever necessary; waste and storm water lines, and water treatment plants along the rivers; and artificial lakes for irrigation. The concept does not propose public participation in the design and implementation process, though unemployed people affected by the project will be offered jobs as day laborers at the construction site. While it admits this project may involve the relocation of people within the buffer zone, it promises to allow existing farmers to continue ‘owning’ and managing their gardens even after the completion of the project. However, whether or not these measures are to be incorporated in the current and future design and construction, raises a number of questions: What justifies the recommendation that the entire river bank will be lined with concrete embankments? Are the existing sewer and storm water lines of the city combined? Will the sewer and storm lines proposed to be built along the river also be combined? Given that most of the water running through the riverbeds in dry seasons is from sewer and storm water lines, where will the water flow into the rivers from if separate sewer and storm water lines are to be built? If, in dry seasons, the river water is expected to come wholly from the water treatment facilities, will this be enough to create running rivers throughout the dry seasons? Can the storm water hazards during the rainy season only be controlled by in situ measures, or are there measures to be implemented beyond the immediate vicinity of the rivers? Are the existing and proposed heavy retention walls and flood control structures necessary if the storm water control measures mentioned above are implemented? 4. The Construction Process The pilot project is expected to be completed in approximately mid-2020 to coincide with the 50thanniversary of the China-Ethiopia diplomatic tie. In fact, part of the project, named Friendship Square, was inaugurated on September 10, 2020 on the Ethiopian New Year. However, the park is not yet open to the public, and construction work is still underway in some parts of the site. Friendship Square is only a small part of the entire project; however, it is a good indicator for how this may transform the entire river landscape and the connected urban spaces. We have made repeated visits to the park (within its perimeters and from the outside), conducted informal interviews, and have taken photographic documentation. Among our findings is that aside from the concrete embankments, the proposed ideas in the concept note – as well as the wildly publicized design – are not being implemented. The riverside development under way and completed (Pictures: Sinkneh Eshetu, 2020) The concrete embankment is even being built in places where the slopes are gentler; which could have been designed in a way for the people and wildlife to interact with the river, adjacent soils, and vegetation. Moreover, it is easily noticeable that sewer and stormwater lines are still emptied into the riverbeds at the completed sites, as well as in the sites under construction. This research will explore whether these are permanent outlets or will later be diverted to storm and sewer lines proposed in the concept note to be built along the rivers. Though the Friendship Square is constructed on a site that was cleared a few years ago for another project and people are not currently being displaced, we are told that young people from the surrounding area are hired in the project in different capacities. Though we did not interview them during our visits, we have seen them working as gardeners, cleaners, and in other areas. The project will soon be expanding to the Eribekentu area that lies opposite Friendship Park, separated from it only by a road, which is still heavily populated by several informal housings which have been in existence for decades. The people in these areas have been told that they are soon be relocated. So far, they are also not formally participating in the design and construction process. Some among them expressed their wish for the project to transform the area without the need for relocation. Works have already begun in other areas the pilot project is expected to include, such as Peacock or Central Park. This area is one of the few public parks that has been in existence for a long time. This is a flood plain where the vegetable gardens are relatively wide, engaging a large number of families. The “owners” of these gardens, some of whom have been working on the land for decades (though the land is actually owned by the public), hope that they will continue to “own” and work on their farms during the coming project. As the informal settlers and farmers are willing to be interviewed, we plan to approach them later with formal interviews to learn their attitudes and ideas about the impending change. This research is yet to find out whether the same Chinese landscape architect, who designed the Friendship Park, will design other parts of the pilot project with or without the participation of local professionals, and whether or not the current local consultants will continue with their tangential contributions. IV. INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCES, TRENDS AND GOOD PRACTICES Around the world, we are beginning to recognise that the treatment of urban river banks and other water bodies with hard infrastructure without considering the natural ecosystem causes incalculable damage. This recognition is motivating designers, as well as city administrators, to take precautions to re-naturalise urban rivers. This trend has taken several approaches which could serve as an invaluable lesson for the Ethiopian context. We have been collecting and selecting different cases from around the world related to the re-naturalisation of urban rivers; natural flooding; erosion and landslide hazard control measures; innovations in dealing with urban complexity and heritage preservation in river rehabilitation projects; and green infrastructure, aesthetics, ecology & survival. These selected cases and lessons, with a due consideration for trends and cases in China, will be presented to the public, as well as professionals, in a way that they may generate awareness and dialogue, which may be used as input in the further design and development of Addis Ababa’s rivers. V. Public Attitude and Engagement A cursory review of social media about the public attitude towards Beautifying Sheger project mostly reveals support, excitement, and appreciation. Some critical voices are heard once in a while. Some of these voices consider such extravagant gardens as luxuries and suggest that this should not be the government’s priority. Others decry the further displacement of citizens and the near total erasure of public memory, which has been ongoing for years in many urban development projects. The impact of the widely publicized Beautifying Sheger River Development project is already starting to be seen. Some other cities in the country are beginning to plan and design similar public spaces and riverside development projects. One of these designs, that of Jimma City, was recently shared on a Facebook group called Ethiopian Architecture and Urbanism [16] . Taking this as an opportunity, we attempted to engage the public and professionals to discuss the Addis Ababa project under consideration. Another discussion was on the heritages and ruins around Addis Ababa (particularly those on Entoto Hill). Some attempts are also made to engage with key decision makers by commenting on their twitter postings. One of these comments was seen by a person in Pakistan who inquired about our findings as similar things are happening in his country. Similar indirect engagements will continue until the research organizes its own events and discussions to sensitize authorities and the public on the probable negative impacts of Beautifying Sheger. Given our current global situation and the condition of the country (COVID-19 and the conflict in Tigray region), other strategies could be planned to safely engage the public. The informal engagements mentioned above indicate that this research has the potential to influence decisions and practices in Ethiopia and beyond it. This will be more so if well planned events are organized, and publicly sharable documentations such as videos are produced, should resources and conditions permit. Sinkneh Eshetu (penname: O’Tam Pulto) is a published author and landscape architect. Aziza Abdulfetah Busser is a landscape designer; practising professional architect, and academician. Berhanu is an anthropologist in African Studies. [1] The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. [2] Terrefe, B. (2020). Urban layers of political rupture: the “new” politics of Addis Ababa’s megaprojects . Journal of Eastern African Studies. DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2020.1774705. [3] Concept Note. (May 18, 2019). Addis Ababa City River Side Green Development . [4] State of NSW and Department of Environment and Climate Change. (2008). Cultural landscapes and park management: a literature snapshot – a report for the cultural landscapes: connecting history, heritage and reserve management research project . Sydney South, Australia. [5] Concept Note. (May 18, 2019). Addis Ababa City River Side Green Development . [6] Terrefe, B. (2020). Urban layers of political rupture: the “new” politics of Addis Ababa’s megaprojects . Journal of Eastern African Studies. DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2020.1774705. [7] Reference to Captain James Cook (1728-1779) who used this term, employed by the British, to justify occupation of a territory on behalf of the Crown, when they claimed possession of Australia. [8] Note: the Chinese government has a slightly different definition for “aid project” ( yuanzhu gongcheng ) which follows market principles (Deborah Brautigam 2009:115). The content of these so-called aid projects can vary case by case. Typically, large construction projects involve the client, constructor, supervisor, and loaner. In other projects contracted to Chinese companies, the Ethiopian government and the International Development Association are often the clients, and the projects are financed through Chinese banks such as Sino Eximbank. [9] CCCC Wins the Contract of Riverside Project, Erecting a Stele of Development and Friendship . http://www.zgzjwx.org/detail/2d0kjg.html . Access Time: September 10, 2020. [10] Derissen, Miriam. 2019. Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia . Hong Kong University Press. [11] For instance, in examining a road construction program in Ethiopia, Driessen (2019) argues that Chinese ignorance of Ethiopia’s labour regulations, as well as the legal protectionism, stems intrinsically from Ethiopia’s political system in which the local state is marginalised in federal-initiated road programs; and it is the local states which often bring Chinese companies to court. Through court decisions, the local administrations form a de facto alliance with local workers [to instead] push through a number of design revisions beneficial to local communities [though without necessarily requiring the consultation of local experts or expertise]. [12] Bräutigam, Deborah. 2009. The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa . Oxford University Press. [13] Derissen, Miriam. 2019. Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia . Hong Kong University Press. [14] Terrefe, B. (2020). Urban layers of political rupture: the “new” politics of Addis Ababa’s megaprojects . Journal of Eastern African Studies. DOI: 10.1080/17531055.2020.1774705. [15] Beyene, M. N. (June, 2016). Urbanization and Its Effect on Surface Runoff: A Case Study on Great Akaki River, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia . Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa Institute of Technology. [16] https://www.facebook.com/groups/665698490519013/?multi_permalinks=1082731795482345¬if_id=1607455244518798¬if_t=group_highlights&ref=notif Previous Next

Events Lecture Series Participant Activities WCSCD Annual Lecture Series 2022 WCSCD Annual Lecture Series 2022 Presented in collaboration with Kolarac Educational program What Could Should Curating Do Annual lecture series 2022 is proud to partner with Kolarac this year Number of mentors of this years educational program will have public moment during stay in Belgrade to share their own practice. As every year this will not be possible without kind support from colleagues and institutions in Serbia and around the world including Kadist Foundation, Italian Cultural Institute of Belgrade, The Group of Architects, Embajada De Espana en Belgrado who support our vision towards pedagogies. Public lectures will be as usual free of charge and open to public. Public lecture series will start in November and we are proud to present following speakers this year. November 9th 2022 18:00 Hajnalka Somogyi is a curator based in Budapest. Since 2014, she has worked as leader and co-curator of OFF-Biennále Budapest , which she initiated. In 2022, OFF-Biennale is participating at documenta fifteen as member of ‘lumbung interlokal’. November 30th 2022 18:00 Aslıhan Demirtaş is a practicing architect, artist, writer and educator. Her practice is situated on and around the boundaries of disciplines engaged in making, often in the forms of buildings, gardens and art projects, while searching for a revised mode of existence and practice on our planet. She lives in Istanbul and together with Ali Cindoruk runs KHORA Office, a climate for design, making and thinking. December 5th 2022 18:00 Massimiliano Mollona teaches anthropology at Department of the Arts at Bologna University and at Goldsmiths College, London. His practice is being situated at the intersection of pedagogy, art and activism which he explores from within projects he co-initiated like the Institute of Radical Imagination and the Laboratory of Urban Commons (Athens). December 13th 2022 18:00 Amelie Aranguren, head of artistic programming at INLAND’s Center for the Aproach to the Rural (CAR) in Madrid and Inland member since 2010. < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >