This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 EPISTEMIC DISOBEDIENCE: INSTITUTION-BUILDING AS ARTISTIC PRACTICE KIM GURNEY CENTRE FOR HUMANITIES RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF THE WESTERN CAPE KGURNEY@UWC.AC.ZA Kim G urney | Epistem ic D isobedience: Institution-Building as Artistic Practice Arts Research Africa 2022158 This paper posits the Nafasi Art Space in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as a paradigmatic example of independent art spaces in Africa. These spaces, known as offspaces, challenge the status quo by creating divergent infrastructures through creative refusals and re-imaginations. The author conducted a prior study called Platform/Plotform, which identified key working principles of offspaces, such as horizontality, performativity, elasticity, convergence, and second chance. The study visited five African cities to examine the correlations between artistic strategies and urban life. The paper focuses on the Nafasi Academy for Contemporary Art, Expression, and Inclusion, launched in 2020, and explores its curriculum and pedagogical domains that may, like the institution itself, build cultural infrastructures while functioning like a work of art. Kim G urney | Epistem ic D isobedience: Institution-Building as Artistic Practice Arts Research Africa 2022159 Introduction A contemporary art academy recently launched by Nafasi Art Space in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, is presented in this paper as paradigmatic of the DIY-DIT working princi- ples of independent art spaces in Africa. Through a combination of creative refusals and re-imaginations, spaces such as Nafasi instantiate infrastructures of divergent kinds that defy the status quo. These so-called offspaces are not only saying things but also doing things with art. Institition-building as artistic practice is both physi- cal and conceptual. It is about building spaces that are multivalent and assembling counter-narratives that are polyvocal – that is, exhibiting epistemic disobedience. They shapeshift in response to radical flux and regard sustainability as inducing to- morrow’s desired world, today. That is the gist of a prior study I conducted, Platform/ Plotform, in which Nafasi Art Space was a key participant. That work is described in depth elsewhere, so I only summarise some key findings here (Part I).1 In its wake, the Nafasi Academy for Contemporary Art, Expression, and Inclusion was launched in 2020 (Part II), offering an ideal opportunity to extend this work into the pedagog- ical domain. I visited Nafasi Academy in 2022 on a research residency to observe its curriculum in action, offer a lecture in exchange, and garner some feedback on what a teaching module might comprise (Part III). Part I: Panya routes “Always start from where you are.” Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s approach to decolonisation (2017) animates Platform/Plotform, in which I set out to fathom key working princi- ples of independent art spaces in selected African cities, using arts-based research, or “thinking in, through and with art” (Borgdorff 2012, 44). I did so by making cor- relations between artistic strategies and everyday urban life among five key case studies, and came up with five principles that were shared: horizontality, performa- tivity, elasticity, convergence, and second chance. These are elaborated upon below. Platform/Plotform was in turn inspired in part by an earlier body of work (includ- ing a Johannesburg atelier) in which forms of commoning were evident alongside self-organised spaces as artistic responses to, and coping mechanisms for, adversity and prevailing uncertainty (Gurney 2019, 223). I coined the research project title from Kodwo Eshun’s reference to how a small-scale platform might “plotform” – that is, hold durational conversations that form plots which solidify over time while simultaneously questioning themselves (qtd. in Cruz 2016, 10–11). The fieldwork, conducted during 2018 and 2019, went beyond South Africa’s borders to find out what other so-called offspaces on the continent were thinking and doing. Offspaces were understood to be independent, collectively organised platforms (not always artist-led), operating on a non-profit basis, with negligible public funding and trans- versal relations to official logics. They are in effect ‘para’ institutions, doing the work of institutions but not resourced in the same way, self-assembling different kinds of infrastructure and enlarging the public sphere. Contemporary art in these contexts is imbricated with everyday forms and practices, and is a vital vector for dialogue, exchange, and connecting public life – in the way that a street-side coffee house, sa- lon, barber, or trading kiosk might be too but with an added dimension of intention- ality. All five participant spaces were ten or more years old, adeptly shapeshifting in response to constant flux. For Platform/Plotform, I visited five fast-changing cities: Nairobi in Kenya (GoDown Arts Centre), Accra in Ghana (ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge), Cai- ro in Egypt (Townhouse Gallery), Addis Ababa in Ethiopia (Zoma Museum) and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania (Nafasi Art Space). Africa and Asia are having to urbanise at rates the West has never had to fathom, according to Aromar Revi (2014), and a Kim G urney | Epistem ic D isobedience: Institution-Building as Artistic Practice Arts Research Africa 2022160 conflation of social, economic and political questions thus need to be figured out at speed and scale. Revi emphasises everyday lives and local solutions as the way forward, and asks: “Can we build the institutional capacity, understanding, culture and technologies to use this oppor- tunity for change and for good?” The institution-building capacity of offspaces, and their DIY-DIT pathways, can be understood as “panya routes,” a Kenyan term for a back route or workaround that is collec- tively formed, generally passable only by nimbler boda bodas, the ubiq- uitous motorbike taxis, or sometimes matatus, the minibus version. Pa- nya routes are inventive coping mechanisms for uncertain terrain and often become the main route over time. Forging such routes involves a radically different way of thinking about sustainability: it is not about perpetuating given conditions but rather instituting tomorrow’s desired world, to- day. A collective ethos, collaborative models, and solidarity networks are at the heart of this institution-building, just like a panya route that is forged over time by many passing feet or wheels improvising their own urban hack. Offspaces likewise have world-building implications: by practising strategies of refusal and re-imagination, together, they are thinking about things not only as they are but also as they could be. They are thinking “as if” rather than “as is,” which Kwame Appiah calls our most as- tonishing human capacity, “the ability to access ways the world is not but might have been” (Appiah 2017, 171). Despite the odds often stacked against them, and amid accel- erated flux, they institute collective forms of assemblage in ways that should interest others in a world where navigating uncertainty, as experienced by the global South majority, is an increasingly relatable condition. I timed my fieldwork visits in Platform/Plotform to coincide with programming deemed representative and ideally coinciding with an independent event that could provide an alternative reading on art and the urban fabric – like a street art festival, off-biennale or workshop. I used a method of juxtaposition rather than comparison to show resonance and dissonance, and to allow for contextual differences while not overstating singularities. The approach is borrowed from Teresa Caldeira’s studies of dissimilar cities from the global South (2017), in which she expands upon the con- cept of “autoconstruction” – a Latin American term for the way residents build their cities incrementally and collectively using whatever is to hand (2017, 5). That, too, is how independent art spaces assemble their offerings, starting small, and valorising forms that already circulate in public life. As Clapperton Mavhunga writes, it is the ordinary innovations borne out of quotidian realities that are notable, and these are heightened during moments of stress or crisis (2017, 21). I went to see art programming – a public arts festival, a nomadic future mu- seums project, a gallery exhibition, a museum rebuild, and an arts festival – but I caught each space on a shapeshifting cusp that reflected its artistic thinking, and in some cases comprised the artwork. The programming was not only about con- temporary art per se, it was a vector for complex transformations that went beyond the artworld in significance. Art regularly intervened in other fields; it helped to imagine new social realities and also sometimes to instantiate them. For instance, the GoDown in Nairobi, named after the large warehouses in the industrial area it inhabits, was preparing itself in 2018 for a major rebuild into an iconic hub, after a lengthy collaborative process “to design with people.” This physical transformation is integrally connected to its annual public arts festival, Nai Ni Who? (urban slang for Who Is Nairobi?), which delegates curatorial agency to local neighbourhoods. These efforts are enfolded in a re-imagination exercise to find common ground between GoDown, cultural practitioners, residents, the business community and public of- ficials. Horizontality is the key working principle triggered. (That said, each of the five principles occurs in each participant space and cross-pollinates; and there is no particular ordering to their incidence.) Horizontality is a collective and non-hierar- Travel log for Platform/Plotform Kim G urney | Epistem ic D isobedience: Institution-Building as Artistic Practice Arts Research Africa 2022161 chical organisational structure. It is also a curatorial ethos, encouraging polyvocality – in the festival, “seeing, feeling, touching, doing, wondering … using all the senses to investigate and question;”2 GoDown’s director Joy Mboya describes this “multiplici- ty of voices” as exhibiting epistemic disobedience.3 ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge in Accra was also shapeshifting in 2018, on the cusp of international forays, with its founder Nana Oforiatta Ayim curating Ghana’s first Venice Biennale pavilion in 2019, and becoming advisor to the govern- ment on museums policy. It later celebrated its twentieth year in 2022 by rebuilding entirely out of raffia palm, led by architect Ophelia Akiwumi, in her mid-80s, re- flecting a shift in focus at ANO to explorations in the areas of knowledge systems, the environment and education. But when I visited, it was still in a former car repair warehouse with its Future Museums project symbolised alongside by an intriguing Mobile Museum – based upon a collapsible kiosk that is nomadic, accessible, mul- tipurpose. The Mobile Museum travelled Ghana with ANO asking everyday people encountered en route what art and culture meant to them, what they would like to see included in a museum and how, and returned with the results in a “polyphony of different ways of telling.”4 This mobility informs a second principle of performativity, understood as the agential capacity for contemporary art, under certain circum- stances, to instantiate a different set of relations. 5 The Townhouse in Cairo had fully reinhabited its premises a few months prior to my research visit in October 2018, following a series of upheavals. As it happened, my documentation of its activities turned out to be one of the last as it closed down its institutional life for good the following year, after 21 years of operating. (Access Art Space arose in its stead.) One salient point about Townhouse was its total im- brication with its locality: the programming was reliant upon what was happening around it, the building, the neighbourhood, the city, the country. So when the or- ganisation finally closed the curtains in 2019, it was responding to a complex nest of factors – political, socio-economic and institutional. “Everything is in flux all the time,” as its former programme manager Maryam Elnozahy phrased it.6 This hyper- locality manifested in the third principle of elasticity. Its counterpart was opacity and refusal when required by circumstances. Zoma Museum in Addis Ababa was in the final stages of a rebuild on a new site it had acquired, and it re-opened in March 2019 shortly after my fieldwork ended. It challenged ideas of what a museum could be by espousing ecological principles and different notions of care. For instance, an inherited kindergarten on the new site became integrated as part of the museum’s operations: Zoma School. The new build was constructed entirely from traditional techniques like wattle and daub, us- ing earth, mud and straw to create beautiful futuristic forms. The Zoma buildings are works of art in their design and intricate sculptural surfaces. Meskerem Asseg- ued, its co-founder, says taking a countrywide trip and seeing historic sites and how buildings had withstood time was an awakening that inspired her to understand these techniques from the foundations up. “The detail. Everything. How the door- knobs work and where the connections are, why do they make small windows and why in that direction. All those things: you have to be curious. And once you under- stand that, you see – oh my god, we missed out a lot. People are abandoning them. I thought it was fascinating. How to bring this into the new world? I thought building a new museum was the right idea.”7 This fusion of temporal scales and typologies triggered the fourth principle of convergence. Nafasi Art Space in Dar es Salaam is a membership-based collective operating from repurposed shipping containers which cued the fifth and final principle of sec- ond chance. Nafasi means ‘space’ as well as ‘opportunity’ in Kiswahili. It fuses both by taking the concepts of repair and re-use one step further, to redirection – find- ing a new purpose for an object, idea or situation and reconfiguring it to a desired end. “Independent spaces are important opportunities for building counter-narra- Kim G urney | Epistem ic D isobedience: Institution-Building as Artistic Practice Arts Research Africa 2022162 tives and imagining other possible worlds,” according to its former director Rebecca Mzengi Corey.8 In 2020, Nafasi took this work of epistemic disobedience into the pedagogical domain with the launch of its own academy. Part II: Nafasi Academy Nafasi Art Space is located along a dusty road in Mikocheni B, a mixed-use area in Dar es Salaam, “place of peace,” a port city dominated by its beguiling coastline dot- ted with container ships and, by some estimates, one of the fastest growing cities on the planet.9 By 2050, a quarter of the world’s population will be in Africa; but even now, 40 per cent of all Africans are under the age of 14 and in most countries the median age is below 20, statistics that impact almost every aspect of life (Paice 2022). Change and growth are evident on the streets of Dar, bustling with people and things on the move, including an impressive elevated railway near completion that cuts across the city. Visiting in 2022, the face of the newly installed president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, looms everywhere from billboards bearing hopeful messages, even from the back of a tuktuk (three-wheeler scooter taxi) taking me to Nafasi. Independent art spaces, embedded amidst these accelerated urban dynamics, are fascinating indicators. Nafasi was started in 2008 by a small group of Tanzanian artists, which makes it the longest-standing independent art centre in the country. It is structured as a membership-based organisation, granting voting rights and oth- er benefits like subsidised studios in exchange for monthly dues alongside visiting artists, a voluminous gallery created from a former warehouse, a large performance arena, restaurant, music recording studio, and digital lab. It has morphed from a visual arts to a multidisciplinary space, embracing an immersive and performative approach. Nafasi is about art as a way to navigate precarity and articulate the strug- gles people face on a daily basis, Corey says. “Our goal in our attempts to institu- tionalise and create a lasting presence is not just to think of permanence as a space, or [for] individuals or artists, but building relevance of the idea of the place of art in society, which in Dar es Salaam we can’t take for granted with pressures coming from the state, or economics, or sociopolitical systems. Art is always pushed to the margins in one way or another, whether it is censorship or being commodified.”10 By way of a very practical example, when I visited in 2019, my arrival got de- layed because police had entered the Nafasi compound that day seeking to arrest an artist. He had managed to evade them, with the result that ten other artists and staff members who happened to be there were detained instead. The artists were later released without charge – and two days later, regardless of this incident, Nafasi went on to produce its planned festival, Asili ni Tamu. “I think abuse of power and lack of due process is something we as an art space and everyone in society have to deal with. I think that experience really showed me the power of the network and solidarity,” Corey said at the time.11 Yet, the deft ability of offspaces to confront such conditions with a combination of creative refusals and reimaginations is one of the defining characteristics to emerge from my research. Regarding her investigations of black social life, Saidiya Hartman speaks about this tension between refusal and utterance, between pessimism and vitalism, as alternate ways to create a desirable set of social arrangements – what she terms “counterfactual imagination.” Hartman says sensory capacity, conjectural anticipation and an imaginative case are unau- thorised by the canon and conducted in a minor key, and calls for thinking “that enables us to refuse and battle the structures that contain us.” 12 Cue the Nafasi Academy of Contemporary Art, Expression and Inclusion. It began life as a discussion in 2018, after Nafasi had been operating as an art space for ten years. The organisation set out to critique its own history and praxis and extend support to those who struggled to find a place in the art community – in particular Kim G urney | Epistem ic D isobedience: Institution-Building as Artistic Practice Arts Research Africa 2022163 women and young artists. In short, the problem of ‘what next’ be- came pressing for artists who had developed over the past four to eight years within Nafasi’s somewhat magic circle.13 “We wanted Na- fasi to be a place where artistic expression continues to evolve, and … to create space for younger artists to come in,” said Corey.14 Another factor was the ad hoc nature of the expertise the artists were receiving, which while significant was starting to feel uneven and unpredictable. What was needed was a more structured approach to address gaps and ensure progress. The decision was made to launch an academy focused on contemporary art and arts management, and the team set about building one – both literally and conceptually. The journey began with the Nafasi community, exploring options and gestating ideas. It is still a work in progress, “a living document,” Corey adds. That document is inspired by other community-oriented curricula, like Bisi Silva’s Asiko School in Lagos, as well as European, Asian and Canadian models. As Corey explained: “Imitating other methods and models of education didn’t feel true to who we were and what we were trying to do – we were referencing other curricula but channel- ling this through our own experience and putting together a curricu- lum we feel is close to what the local context requires.” That process started with asking questions, and the curriculum is built the same way, with various ideas coalescing into thematic modules around overlapping enquiries. The physical build, created by the Nafasi community itself, takes its context seriously, using defunct shipping containers sourced from Dar port. The damaged corners and dented sides of the containers from which it is assembled embody the working principle of second chance – of re- pair, recycling, and redirection. The art shop, the first view of the academy upon entering the Nafasi compound, bulges out at one end. Many cities around the world now embrace container design chic but the Nafasi build is far more pragmatic, as I learnt in conversation with Maria Kessi, Community Manager and core member. Nafasi’s premises were initially built this way to keep mobile in case it had to relo- cate at short notice – something that transpired when its first premises were sold. Among its aspirations for 2026 in its latest Strategic Plan, Nafasi includes “a perma- nent home.”15 The design of Nafasi Academy references a local market, Kariakoo, via various distinguishing features of the market, notably its elevated canopy, dominating stair- well and trading kiosks. Situated in a tall concrete building designed by Beda Johna- than Amuli and inspired by a tree canopy, Kariakoo spans several city blocks and sells all manner of items. The market spills out beyond the building’s confines. All these features find expression in the academy design: the elevated canopy arching over the entire academy; the stairs dramatically leading up from the amphitheatre to the library space above; and the kiosks giving inspiration to the art shop and stu- dios alongside. The classroom is tucked away underneath the upstairs library, and there is also a workshop and a glass-fronted gallery. The build fulfils four needs that were identified by the Nafasi artists in a 2018 poll: • Space (physical and political); • Education; • Exchange (networks); & • Platforms (markets). It was built with the support of Lauren Marshall (designer), Shabani Kisala (engineer and builder), with the Nafasi team and academy student members pitching in. Design inspiration for Nafasi Academy taking the elevated canopy of Kariakoo market as referent. Credit: Muddyb, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Design for Nafasi Academy, by Lauren Marshall, image courtesy Nafasi Art Space https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Kim G urney | Epistem ic D isobedience: Institution-Building as Artistic Practice Arts Research Africa 2022164 In 2022, when I visited the academy, it was in its third year of operating. The detailed curriculum alternates each year between an intensive contemporary art course and curatorship training. The annual rhythm starts with a theory-intensive module, followed by production, a public event, and mentorship, and includes a range of formats from workshops to exchanges, assignments, group work, site visits, community contributions, studio production and public-fac- ing events. The design is neither linear nor encyclopaedic. As Nafasi writes in its publication reviewing its first academy year, Art as Educa- tion: “One major rebellion of the curriculum design was to build the course not around time-periods, geographies, techniques and media, or even topics, but rather to create clusters of interrelated, perhaps unanswerable questions, emphasising the role of art in envisioning new realities and ways of thinking and being” (Nafasi 2020, 14). Part III: Classrooms as artworks I visited Nafasi Academy to conduct research in August-September 2022, a visit that coincided with a week-long module in its curricu- lum on public art, towards which I contributed a guest lecture.16 The classroom offered lively immersion in a range of concepts – from ‘the gaze’ to ‘othering’ and ‘centring.’ Other guest lecturers included film- maker Amil Shivji considering the challenge of how to provincialise Europe, taking a cue from Ousmane Sembene, “Europe is not my centre,” to practising artists such as Paul Ndunguru presenting the realities of leveraging work into public space, and experts from ap- plied disciplines talking about how creative thinking might open up new perspectives in urban development. It was striking to note how many academy participants themselves came from other disciplines: one was an accountant, another a general practice lawyer reshuffling her schedule to fit the art academy into her workload. Simon Sogo- di, the academy coordinator, is himself a biologist with a teaching background who formerly worked for Unicef against child violence. “I studied science but I found in science there is art. It is something you cannot differentiate … The way you design things, there is art. Art is a science too,” Sogodi said.17 These two worlds coming together provides him with linking concepts, so that, for instance, he offered the academy a class on public psychology. This cross-pollination is arguably what Nafasi does on a larger scale – what Sogodi describes as a learner-centred approach, responding to what each per- son knows and brings with them. Art, he adds, lets you present complex ideas in an accessible way. Art is a vector for thinking about the world at large. Adjacent to the Nafasi class- room are the studios. Stopping in, I noticed that concepts circulating in the class- room were already evident in the artworks in progress. One artist showed me his latest series of paintings, a critique of societal class structure and the realities of sys- temic drag, using symbols including a table (of power) and steps that at first seemed to suggest movement but on closer reflection revealed how the game of progress is rigged. The students were challenged, following the theory-intensive phase, to pro- duce collaborative performance artworks in public spaces. Proposed ideas included societal issues from homelessness to mental health, first test-run in the Nafasi com- pound and then for real in public space. I arrived in Dar es Salaam in 2022 with the provisional idea of returning to run a future course on institution-building as artistic practice, based upon the findings of Nafasi Academy, using upcycled shipping containers The amphitheatre The library Kim G urney | Epistem ic D isobedience: Institution-Building as Artistic Practice Arts Research Africa 2022165 Platform/Plotform.18 I left, having abandoned that plan for a very different proposi- tion. Three things immediately became evident: (i) Translation into Kiswahili would be a requirement for a short course; (ii) Interactivity and questioning using multi- media prompts worked best; (iii) Tethering new ideas to relatable content was ideal. Some of this felt within my grasp, if I were to return with a stand-alone or parallel offering. But to fit with the academy’s approach, something very different seemed to be called for. My tentative conclusion was not to create a course that I would come back to teach, but to develop instead a digital toolkit akin to a library of resources that underpins the same content and is accessible to others. It could be open-source and iterative. Others elsewhere could feasibly borrow from the toolkit and add to it, while repurposing the content to their own ends. There are programmes in the pipeline at Nafasi Art Space, including one in training and capacity building in arts management, which would use a Nafasi blue- print to help participants establish regional arts hubs. The proposed toolkit could work very well in tandem with such a course. But it has potential value for other contexts, too, because it conveys the world-building capacities and artistic thinking of offspaces to manage successfully to navigate conditions of flux and uncertainty. The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, founded in 2016 by William Kentridge, began life in this way: “We had the freedom to create an institution in the same way as on artwork,” is how Bronwyn Lace described helping to set it up.19 One of the frustrations of conducting my own Platform/ Plotform research was the ringfencing of reference material behind firewalls, its geographic dispersal and inaccessibility. A library of ref- erences, ready-to-use technologies, and other teaching aids that are crowdsourced could help to offset this hurdle for other researchers. One of the modes such a toolkit could consider in its assemblage is ‘wicked arts assignments’ (Heijnen and Bremmer, 2020) – that is, learning tasks that act as artworks. The editors offer numerous examples in their volume about practising creativity in contemporary arts education. “My pedagogical way of work- ing … has been to rethink what a seminar looks like: how do we make class a work of art”, writes Stephanie Springgay (2020, 50) who has developed an Instant Class Kit – a mobile curriculum guide and pop-up exhibition exemplifying aesthetic ped- agogy of the not-yet-known inspired by Fluxus. Likewise, “Teaching influences my art practice, and vice versa … And I notice that art disciplines are becoming increas- ingly hybrid, both in the art world and in art education, but the study programmes are still lagging in this respect …. Education can really also be an artistic medium”, writes Pavèl van Houten (2020, 54). There are online educational tools such as The Art Assignment where artists offer prompts that anyone can take up and run with, making artistic thinking accessible and relevant.20 Examples closer to home include MuseumFutures Africa, a pan-African collaborative project that works with muse- ums across the continent to explore potentially new formats of African museology. This experiment includes a curriculum for each participating museum’s study group, which functions more like a prompt, “flexible and responsive to the context and need of each museum … that encourage(s) self-reflection, collective exploration and criticality through questioning and practice-based enquiry” (2020-21, 5). This all relates to an underlying concern in this larger body of work: how insti- tutions can operate as artworks, based upon Guattari’s question “How do you make a class operate like a work of art?” (1995, 133). David Andrew builds upon that prov- ocation to set up some characteristics that comprise the artist’s sensibility; for the class to be a work of art, or “an extended socially engaged, durational activity”, those capacities also need to work in tandem with relational and dialogical aesthetics, he writes (2011, 56). Crucially, Andrew notes how “order is tricked by art,” following Michel de Certeau, and posits: “This is how classrooms (all institutions) become Class assignment Nafasi Academy Kim G urney | Epistem ic D isobedience: Institution-Building as Artistic Practice Arts Research Africa 2022166 artworks and how the occupants of these spaces recover the artist” (Andrew 2011, 58). His treating classrooms as an instance of institutions in general raises the tan- talising possibility of other kinds of institutional forms also operating as artworks, which I elaborate upon in more detail elsewhere.21 Parting Thoughts Nafasi Academy, as discussed, is a lively demonstration of the five key working prin- ciples of independent art spaces in the following inter-related ways: • horizontality in its flat organisational structure, communally built spaces and self-assembled academy curriculum; • performativity by doing things with art; • elasticity by acting local and thinking global; • convergence by creating a desired tomorrow, today; & • second chance by redirecting existing forms and technologies already circu- lating in public life (re-use/ repair). It is potentially a case study, or mobile curriculum, in this not-yet-known toolkit to help other offspaces on the continent crowdsource their ongoing work of epistemic disobedience. Perhaps the idea is not as tricky to assemble as it seems: it should just follow its subject matter and institute itself as if it were an offspace. “Always start from where you are.” Acknowledgements This work is based on research partly supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and made possible through the project on “A Prac- tice of Postapartheid Freedom” at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. It is also supported by the South African National Research Chair in Urban Policy, and the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, where Platform/Plotform was based, and which funded my travel to Nafasi Academy. Parts of Part II draw upon work articulated in Panya Routes (2022), first published by Motto Books. Special thanks to Rebecca Mzengi Corey at Nafasi Art Space, the team at Nafasi, its Art Academy members, and co-ordinator Simon Sogodi. Images are by the author unless credited otherwise. 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Amsterdam: Valiz. https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/30352 https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00696 https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00696 http://media.wix.com/ugd/672989_62cfa13ec4ba47788f78ad660489a2fa.pdf http://media.wix.com/ugd/672989_62cfa13ec4ba47788f78ad660489a2fa.pdf https://issuu.com/nafasiartspace/docs/academy_publication_small-compressed https://issuu.com/nafasiartspace/docs/academy_publication_small-compressed https://youtube/1bl-2F8Nj7U https://youtube/1bl-2F8Nj7U http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/20/by-2050-a-quarter-of-the-worlds-people-will-be-af http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/20/by-2050-a-quarter-of-the-worlds-people-will-be-af http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/20/by-2050-a-quarter-of-the-worlds-people-will-be-af https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huuB-IN0ywY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huuB-IN0ywY Kim G urney | Epistem ic D isobedience: Institution-Building as Artistic Practice Arts Research Africa 2022168 Notes 1. See Gurney (2022), in particular Chapter 3: Future Forms, pp.112– 159, & Chapter 5: Off-spaces as urban indicators, 194–209; Gurney (2023) summaries the five key principles. 2. Joy Mboya, Reframe conversation series: “Civic Power.” African Centre for Cities, [online] 14 October 2020, www. africancentreforcities.net/programme/reframe-conversation- series/ 3. “Animating and Activating Citizens.” Conference keynote, University of Cape Town, African Centre for Cities, 2 February 2018. Author’s notes. 4. Excerpted from a script hand-painted onto the walls of the Future Museums exhibition at ANO Institute. 5. I draw this understanding from J. L. Austin’s work, How to Do Things with Words (1962), in which he regards certain words as performatives, or forms that change the world by the force of their utterance. 6. Personal interview, Cairo, October 2018. 7. Personal interview, Addis Ababa, January 2019. 8. Personal interview, Dar es Salaam, 1 April 2019. Corey was director 2016–2022. The current managing director is Lilian Mushi. 9. One of the most extreme projections by the Global Cities Institute in Toronto estimates Dar es Salaam as the third largest city in the world by 2100 (Hoornweg & Pope, 2014). 10. Corey, “Beyond Our Borders,” public panel organised as part of Platform/ Plotform workshop, Cape Town, www. africancentreforcities.net/video-beyond-our-borders- independent-art-spaces-as-a-lens-on-city-futures/. 11. Personal interview, Dar es Salaam, 2019. 12. “Writing Black Social Life,” seminar, University of the Western Cape, 2 May 2019. Author’s notes. 13. Fourteen studio artists completed five-year terms in 2019 and all of them went on to establish their own studios, spaces and venues. 14. Personal interview, Dar es Salaam, 2 September 2022. 15. Nafasi Art Space Strategic Plan 2021–26, p.11. Available: https:// issuu.com/nafasiartspace/docs/nafasi_art_space_strategic_ plan_2021-26_compressed 16. “Guerilla Gallery: An Artist-Led Roving Platform.” Guest lecture at Nafasi Academy, August 2022. 17. Personal interview, Dar es Salaam, 5 September 2022. 18. I have separately developed the outline of a 12-session course that turns Panya Routes (Gurney 2022), about Platform/Plotform, into a postgraduate teaching module with five independent spaces including Nafasi as case studies; this ‘masterclass’ was the starting point for a course structure and remains a work in progress for tertiary teaching purposes. Its realisation is subject to institutional variables. 19. Bronwyn Lace, “The Collapse: Creative Liberation of Collective Making.” Panel discussion, Worldings: A Virtual Conference, Griffin Art Projects and Urban Shaman, 10 July 2021. 20. www.theartassignment.com 21. See Gurney (2022), “Future Forms: DIT-DIT Institution Building as Artistic Practice,” pp. 112–159. http://www.africancentreforcities.net/programme/reframe-conversation-series/ http://www.africancentreforcities.net/programme/reframe-conversation-series/ http://www.africancentreforcities.net/programme/reframe-conversation-series/ http://www.africancentreforcities.net/video-beyond-our-borders-independent-art-spaces-as-a-lens-on-city-fut http://www.africancentreforcities.net/video-beyond-our-borders-independent-art-spaces-as-a-lens-on-city-fut http://www.africancentreforcities.net/video-beyond-our-borders-independent-art-spaces-as-a-lens-on-city-fut https://issuu.com/nafasiartspace/docs/nafasi_art_space_strategic_plan_2021-26_compressed https://issuu.com/nafasiartspace/docs/nafasi_art_space_strategic_plan_2021-26_compressed https://issuu.com/nafasiartspace/docs/nafasi_art_space_strategic_plan_2021-26_compressed http://www.theartassignment.com