DE TING WEH E DO CACAO NA E GO DO CAFÉ.
On Sowing and Reaping, of Holistic Overstandings of Cultures

With these INVOCATIONS in collaboration with Bandjoun Station, we open our project UNRAVELING THE (UNDER-)DEVELOPMENT COMPLEX OR TOWARDS A POST- (UNDER-)DEVELOPMENT INTERDEPENDENCE – AN ODE TO WALTER RODNEY’S “HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA” 50 YEARS ON (1972–2022) which celebrates Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa fifty years after its publication, while asking the question: How can we imagine a Post-(under)development World?

By relating Rodney’s seminal work to the dependency theorists, as much as to the post-development advocates like Ivan Illich, Gustavo Esteva, Wolfgang Sachs, Arturo Escobar or Majid Rahnema, to the struggles of ecofeminists of degrowth like Maria Mies, Amaia Pérez Orozco, Chandra Talpade Mohanty – among many others, this project is a daring effort to analyze the status quo and imagine a world that doesn’t exist in the binary of “development” and “underdevelopment”. The project will be choreographed to manifest itself as a two-fold series of research, exhibitions, performances, lectures, workshops around the myths of “development” and “underdevelopment” as well as imagining and crafting a Post-(under)development world.

With this project we aim at shaping a network of activists, sonic agitators, scholars, artists and designers, political economists and practitioners, to share knowledge across languages as well as sonority to imagine and shape together a post developmental age. A pluriverse of interdependent imaginations, visions and strategies, away from capitalist and industrial productivity and toward transformative conviviality.