Tamale Territories #2: Fictions on Aqua, Plants and Plastic

In its second phase in 2022, Tamale Territories' aim is to create speculative scenarios, Fictions on Aqua, Plants and Plastic for - and from - the Tamale Waterworks and Forest Reserve, and the surrounding city. Instead of human-centered strategies of problem-solving, a fictional, narrative approach is utilised, unfolding abundance, the multitude of identified potentials, and solarpunk futures. The transdisciplinary [A]FA team covers the fields of architecture, art, photography,  microbiology, water engineering, and farming, as well as a diverse range of national/geographical contexts. The team continues working on this lab project up until September 2022.

Background: Tamale can be characterized by its horizontality and the presence of peripheral urban conditions embedded in the fabric of the city. Since 2020, [A]FA investigates Tamale´s large Forest Reserve adjoining the historic Tamale Waterworks as an example of an inner-urban periphery in the city. In 2021, the 160-hectare terrain was explored in a collaborative workshop with Tamale´s the Savannah Center for Contemporary Art, and supported by a series of lectures by UDS, to begin researching the diverse urban ecologies of the terrain. The team focused on non-anthropocentric systems and ecologies through artistic and phenomenological research. Thereby, the topical lenses of Territories, Peripheries, Ecologies, Scales, and Crisis served as a starting point. The team traced urban agricultural practices through interviews and drone flights; collected archival material of the colonial-era waterworks infrastructure and the dam’s catastrophic collapse; mapped the liminal spaces between the forest reserve and the surrounding neighborhoods; and observed diverse types of indigenous and cultivated vegetation and cross-species processes that shaped the landscapes of the terrain. The research was shown in an on-site work-in-progress exhibition one of the abandoned Waterworks buildings. From March 2021 onward, the research has been collected in five video pieces that focus on one topic each. The works were set in dialogue as site-specific interventions in the exhibition Ecologies & Politics of the Living as part of the Vienna Biennale for Change 2021, end of September 2021 in Vienna. In February 2022, the five videos have been brought back to Tamale Waterworks with a public screening. In paralle Tamale Territories #2: Fictions on Aqua, Plants and Plastic as described above started.

This lab project is ongoing and not open for new applicants this term.