How can architects and other designers reclaim digital tools to build worlds that matter to them and the communities in which they work? Who builds these digital tools and makes them common? What alternative platforms might designers imagine and create?

The Canadian Centre for Architecture’s The Digital Now: Architecture and Intersectionality, a Multidisciplinary Research Project funded by the Mellon Foundation, brings together a group of transdisciplinary researchers from Colombia, Ethiopia, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States to address the urgent need to collaboratively create digital technologies and build more critical sites and spatial imaginaries. The CCA conceives of the digital as a shared space of critique that can engage new media technologies to intervene in everyday realities and the projection of futures.

Organized in collaboration with Sankofa Danzafro and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, this event brings together Miriam Abraham, Xavi Laida Aguirre, Moa Carlsson, Shelby Doyle, Orit Halpern, Pedro Aparicio Llorente, Thandi Loewenson, and Simone Niquille and their collective explorations in documenting, generating, and projecting digital worlds.

The evening will focus on a dialogue between designer Miriam Abraham and artists from the Sankofa dance company. Sankofa will present a fragment of Deadline, a choreography designed to make visible testimonies, memories and resistance struggles that, through dance, give power to face the dangers that restrict autonomy and social emancipation. By investigating ancestral techniques such as the Currulao, Sankofa moves through body and world as a same territory that generates collective actions to establish common well-being when dancing together. Sankofa will weave with Abraham’s research on digital cosmologies of the Sahel region of Africa and reflect on the importance of embodied knowledge in the African diaspora; how digital technologies connect and set people apart; and how not knowing and opacity are important conditions to build community through movement in shared spaces.

This event takes place at Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (Cra. 44 #19a-100, El Poblado, Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia).

To attend please RSVP to studium@cca.qc.ca.