Date: March 17, 2026
Medium: Zoom (RSVP link)
Time: 3 PM London | 6 PM Nairobi
About
This webinar explores how artists, art collectives, creative studios, and informal exhibition spaces function as critical urban infrastructures across Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, Kampala, and UK allies in London and Liverpool. The session reflects on how visual mapping, illustration, and ethnographic encounters contribute to the collective efforts to centre the often-invisible systems that sustain cultural production in African cities and their diasporic connections.
Bringing together visual artists, curators, cartographers, and urban researchers, the discussion examines how studio practices operate as sites of learning, mutual aid, experimentation, and self-organisation, particularly in contexts where formal arts infrastructure remains limited or unevenly available. Connected to a current project Dunda Studio, Dunda Show developing an illustrated online publication, the conversation will also explore the methodological possibilities of illustrated urban research as a way of documenting bottom-up creative economies, spatial practices, and artistic imaginaries.
The session is open to artists, curators, cultural producers, urban practitioners, researchers, and students working across art, architecture, urban studies, geography, development, anthropology, and African studies. Contributors will share reflections from collaborative efforts to map and document artist studios across East Africa, alongside perspectives from interlocutors connected to curatorial and artistic networks in the UK.
Together, the discussion invites participants to consider the illustrated ecologies of artist studios and the wider infrastructures that sustain cultural production across African and diasporic urban contexts.
