Mapping Afropolitan Imaginaries 2 The Centre for Urban and Built Ecologies

Abstract

This workshop, “Mapping Afropolitan Imaginaries 2,” built upon a public stakeholder workshop convened on 15 March 2024 entitled “Mapping Afropolitan Imaginaries 1”. As a pair, these workshops set out to explore and celebrate the ‘Afropolitan’ dimension of creativity in London life – a cultural tendency in our art, media, books, style, food and fashion. Workshop 1 took the temperature of Afropolitan sentiment, creativity and patterns of belonging in London as a starting point for mapping an emergent collective identity. Workshop 2 dug deeper into the questions and content raised by that event and represented in its outputs. Artist and academic Mavernie Cunningham led the full-day workshop bringing together eight invited stakeholders with members of the project team and their partners.

Participants were invited to explore contemporary urban identities and creative forms of practice in the African and Black diaspora community of London that go beyond the cliché of cosmopolitanism. The aim was to collaborate on an art-led participatory workshop to co-produce a map of intersecting imaginaries. This activity drew upon the mini-manifestoes and guiding principles developed in the previous workshop. We investigated the extent to which our collaborative cartography figures as a cultural manifestation of solidarity and agency that we may think of as Afropolitan.

The “Mapping Afropolitan Imaginaries 2” workshop was the third of four events in a series at the heart of a research and knowledge exchange project called London Afropolitan.

The project team, from London Metropolitan University, includes Mavernie Cunningham, and Emma Carpenter.

Workshop leader: Mavernie Cunningham is Head of Art at London Metropolitan University. Both an experienced educator as well as an artist, she maintains a multidisciplinary practice that includes a range of the visual output, spoken word, and as a musician. More recently, Cunningham’s artistic practice and research activity has included collaborative film making sound and performative spoken word.