Acupuncturing Accra is a metropolitan-scale artistic research, mapping, and archiving project developed with the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Accra (FCA-Ghana), as part of ACCRA—one50 (2026–2027).

Over the past term, selected I oA participants, together with Accra-based young architects and artists, collaboratively investigated three urban sites, one in each of three neighborhoods of Accra—Adabraka, Dansoman, and Madina. These open spaces function as urban waypoints where everyday practices, a multiplicity of social networks, and spatial manifestations intersect, revealing narratives of Accra’s rapidly transforming urban fabric. The project approaches these spaces not only as sites of human activity and social exchange, but also as environments shaped by more-than-human processes. Through walking, photographing, drone-based observation, scanning, mapping, drawing, and counter-mapping, the project reveals the city’s latent spatial potentials and urban alternative narratives, contributing to an understanding of Accra’s urban fabric and social life—and its multi-species and environmental entanglements—in the context of the city’s 150th anniversary in 2027.

This term, the lab focuses on the (re)presentation, distribution, and archiving of the (applied) research material emerging from the Acupuncturing Accra field lab in September 2026. Participants will develop a series of booklet-format publications that curate and communicate the project's mappings, counter-mappings, archival research, and spatial investigations. Particular attention will be given to questions of knowledge production, authorship, visual representation, and public dissemination, exploring how artistic research can circulate across institutional, civic, and digital platforms while contributing to ongoing debates on urban transformation, daily spatial practices, collective memory, and ways of understanding the city beyond human-centered perspectives.

Lead: Baerbel Mueller (Accra, Vienna); with Abdul-Rauf Issahaque (Accra, Vienna) and Philipp Reinsberg (Vienna) in collaboration with the FCA and invited guests.

Closed team; no new participants can be accepted at this point.