Join us for a virtual tour and exhibition preview of Dadaab Commons on Wednesday, March 12, from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM (New York Time) / 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM (Nairobi Time).
Dadaab Commons
What does a refugee camp teach us about making a commons? Let us think with the multigenerational refugee camps near the town of Dadaab, Kenya. Established in 1991 in lands crossing present-day Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, the Dadaab refugee camp complex has been one of the UNHCR’s largest and longest running establishments, currently engaged in a proposed process of integration into the Kenyan state. Kenya’s third largest grouping of people, after Nairobi and Mombasa, the Dadaab settlements have systematized architectural and planning practices carried out since, in international responses to crises elsewhere in the world.
Yet, looking closely at Dadaab, we find African ways of knowing. These are expressed in generations of migratory building and craft practices. Ancient understandings of the landscape and ecology. Historical particularities and a politics in oceanic, riverine, mountain, desert, plains, and urban relations. Song and oral traditions of sharing. Socialities and ways of living on land that supersede the proprietary. We acknowledge the elders and communities in Dadaab, whose lives and work hold meaning for us all.
Acknowledging the ecologies and aesthetics of a camp settlement and the land it occupies, the partitions and borders it reifies, the domesticities insurgent in the act of sheltering in emergency, and the sedentarizations embedded in interregional and international migration is part of our artistic and architectural embrace of Dadaab. We move beyond reductive understandings of refugee camps, and turn to ways of life and habitation undertaken by people in extraordinary conditions. Our works reflect the architectures and ecologies of Dadaab, which open onto knowledges common to us all. In this, we hope to find ways of living together, and building an intellectual commons.
Dadaab Commons, held at the GoDown Arts Centre in Kilimani, in Nairobi, Kenya, is curated by Prof. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, at Barnard College, Columbia University. The exhibition features works and insights of AbdulFatah Adam, Cave Bureau, Deqa Abshir, Elsa MH Mäki, James Muriuki, Peterson Kamwathi, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, and is organized in collaboration with GoDown Arts Centre partner and guest curator Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi.
This exhibition preview is co-sponsored by the Institute of African Studies (IAS), the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department (AAADS), the Institute of Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS), Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW).