Menna Agha and Ola Hassanain edit, curate, and annotate this collection of stories by black Europeans, in which they tell stories of African peoplehood in cities that didn’t want them. They gather and tell stories of care, refusal, and the many place-making emotions that carved black spaces despite European cities. This collection includes stories by k. eltinaé, Mário Barros, Moad Musbahi, Sarah Bekambo, Bothan Ahmed Botan, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, and Nasra Abdullahi who recount, account, testify, theorize, plot, and speculate. The storytellers write in a sense-making exercise that seeks to shake the epistemic grounds on which they were forced to stand.
Menna Agha is a Nubian architect and researcher, she writes about territories, shadows, emotions, and her grandmother. Ola Hassanain is an artist and architect based in Amsterdam, who trained her focus on the subtle politics of space – namely, how built spaces react to and reinforce violence from state entities.
Editors: Menna Agha, Ola Hassanain
Introduction and afterword: Menna Agha
Texts: Nasra Abdullahi, Mário Barros, Sarah Bekambo, Bothan
Ahmed Botan, k. eltinaé, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Moad
Musbahi
Artwork: Ola Hassanain
Graphic design: Anežka Hrubá Ciglerová
Published by VI PER Gallery, Prague, 2021
100 pages, 180 × 120 mm
Language: English
First edition
ISBN 978-80-908433-1-8
Supported by the Future Architecture Platform – Creative Europe, Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, City of Prague and State Cultural Fund of the Czech Republic.
