Fugitive Archives: A Sourcebook for Centring Africa in Histories of Architecture is a collection of primary sources chosen by each of the ten researchers of 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, Łukasz Stanek, and Huda Tayob.

Comprised of archival materials and documentation of varied media and formats, the collected sources offer unique readings of different actors, structures, and geographies—on and off the Continent—that multiply histories of modern African architecture. Rather than suggesting key, but inevitably reductive, themes, the three sections of the book bring into dialogue sources that foreground similar approaches to location and accessing archives. These open-ended groupings are framed by conversations between the researchers about the “how” of centering Africa through archival research—methods and challenges of different ways of finding, seeing, and listening. Fugitive Archives offers students, educators, and researchers a critical resource for expanding and/or dismantling existing architectural and colonial archives, for teaching global architecture history, and for future scholarship.

This roundtable is the first occasion for readers to encounter the work. The book will serve as a starting point for a discussion on stretching and reimagining archival futures for the African continent.

Free and open to the public. Register here.

Moderators:
Claire Lubell, Canadian Centre for Architecture
Rafico Ruiz, Canadian Centre for Architecture

Panelists:
Rachel Lee, TU Delft
Ikem Stanley Okoye, University of Delaware
Huda Tayob, University of Manchester

Respondants:
Thandi Loewenson, Royal College of Art
Nokubekezela Mchunu, University College Dublin