Earlier this month, we welcomed Kamael Kirkland and Maryam Muhammad to G.A.S. Lagos for an eight-week internship, delivered in partnership with Spelman College and the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective (AUC Collective). Now in its third year, this collaboration continues to support emerging arts professionals through meaningful exposure to curatorial practice, research, and cultural programming.

Nubuke Foundation is a contemporary art and cultural institution based in Accra, Ghana, dedicated to advancing African artistic practice while preserving and promoting indigenous knowledge systems. Through exhibitions, residencies, research, and public programming, the Foundation operates as both a site of artistic production and a platform for cultural memory.

Central to its work is a focus on material traditions including textiles and clay. These materials are explored as both artistic mediums and archival systems. Nubuke’s programmes engage artists, artisans, and communities in long-term processes of documentation, reinterpretation, and transmission.

In recent years, the Foundation has expanded its work into archival development, building collections that include artist records, oral histories, and material culture documentation. These efforts challenge conventional archival frameworks by prioritising embodied knowledge, community participation, and non-linear histories.

Through local and international collaborations, Nubuke contributes to critical conversations on decolonisation, knowledge production, and the future of African art. It is increasingly positioned as a key site for developing experimental approaches to archives and publishing within the continent.

RAW Material Company is a centre for art, knowledge and society. It is an initiative involved with curatorial practice, artistic education, residencies, knowledge production, and archiving of theory and criticism on art.

It works to foster appreciation and growth of artistic and intellectual creativity in Africa. The programme is trans-disciplinary and is equally informed by literature, film, architecture, politics, fashion, cuisine and diaspora.

RAW Material Company is made of:

RAW Base, a resource centre specialized in contemporary art,

RAW Académie, an experimental study programme for artistic thinking and production

Ker Issa, residencies and studios for artists, curators, authors and researchers.

RAW Material Company’s premises are located in Sicap Baobabs and Zone B. RAW Material Company Zone B is a former 1950s residential home of Modernist inspiration in a historic neighbourhood of Dakar. The renovation of this space is a departure point from which we wish to develop research and projects on the role of architecture and urban planning in shaping contemporary societal discourse in African cities.

A collaborative project between the Department of English Literary Studies and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, African Literary Cities: Hubs, Maps and Literary Urban Ecologies addresses the “absenting” of African literary cities –a complex engagement with cityness and literariness – in both globally authoritative cultural policy discourses and the emerging scholarly field of Literary Urban Studies. As a form of urbanity, the literary city can be considered a narrative that (re)produces itself in both material and imaginative forms and can thus not be read solely with one single disciplinary lens. This project therefore proposes the notion of “literary urban ecologies” to make sense of the complex entanglements and (re)productions of cityness and literature. We are not concerned with creating an authoritative definition of the African Literary City. Rather, we are interested in mapping how literary cityness is locally produced in the contexts of dynamic African cities that are constantly “ making connections of all kinds through their literary (re)presentation. To this end, we have engaged with different Literary Festivals on the continent, and engage in an ongoing project of mapping representations of African cityness in literary works through a crowd-sourced online map.