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Fugitive Archives: A Sourcebook for Centring Africa in Histories of Architecture

Join us at LAPA for conversations over drinks, food, and music as we launch the Canadian Centre for Architecture's most recent book Fugitive Archives, co-published by the CCA and Jap Sam Books. 

During this evening, editor Claire Lubell, graphic designers Naadira Patel and Fred Swart, and research fellows Warebi Gabriel Brisibe and Ramota Obagah-Stephen will share their reflections on the making of the book and how it may help write new histories of architecture. Nombuso Mathibela will then present a sonic reaction to the sourcebook as research and archive.

The event is free. Book tickets

About the book:

A collection of primary sources chosen by the research fellows Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture, Doreen Adengo, Dele Adeyemo, Warebi Gabriel Brisibe and Ramota Obagah-Stephen, Rachel Lee and Monika Motylinska, Ikem Stanley Okoye, Cole Roskam, Lukasz Stanek, and Huda Tayob.

Fugitive Archives is not a book about African architecture or its history. It is a book about the role of primary research in the work of the fellows and about how, to centre Africa in histories of modern architecture, they had to develop new ways of finding, seeing, and listening. The sources presented here are starting points for dismantling and expanding existing architectural archives, in which what is considered valuable enough to archive remains dominated by colonial or Western knowledge frameworks. Through varied media and formats, the sources multiply narratives by highlighting diverse actors, practices, and geographies—on and off the continent—implicated in the history of modern African architecture. Rather than suggesting key, but inevitably reductive, themes, this book brings the fellows and their sources into dialogue in three sections that foreground similar methods and challenges to locating, accessing, reading, and constructing otherwise fugitive archives.

Edited by Claire Lubell and Rafico Ruiz

Graphic design by Naadira Patel and Fred Swart

Co-published with Jap Sam Books

Softcover, 232 pages

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