Workshop 5

"You cannot make experimental work and keep quiet."

— Anjalika Sagar

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, January 2026 — Where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans converge, the otherworldly Table Mountain presides over a city of striking contrasts. Colonial architecture persists alongside deep-rooted diverse local culture, held within the extraordinary natural beauty of the South African coast. It is a city with a thriving contemporary art and media scene and a long tradition of artists whose work sees and exists across geographies.

For AFMAC's fifth and final workshop — following stops in Lagos, Tangier, Nairobi, and Dakar — Cape Town was a fitting culmination. The city is home to some of the continent's most vital arts organizations and the renowned institution Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA), formerly led by the incomparable curator Koyo Kouoh, whose legacy runs through this project.

Along with partnering with Zeitz MOCAA throughout the project, AFMAC’s local partner for the Cape Town workshops was Chimurenga — the Pan-African publication, library, and cultural practice founded by Ntone Edjabe in 2002. Part journal, part archive, part ongoing conversation, Chimurenga occupies a singular place in African intellectual and artistic life, operating at the intersection of writing, music, and visual culture. It was here that AFMAC gathered for a week of workshops, screenings, and dialogue.

Leading the Cape Town sessions were Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group, the London-based interdisciplinary collective whose practice spans film, essay, sound, and theory. For nearly two decades, The Otolith Group has developed a body of work that questions how images move through time, how futures are imagined and inherited, and how postcolonial histories live inside the present moment.

The Cape Town workshop explored ideas of cosmotechnics and animation. Drawing from the philosophical work of the Hong Kong-based thinker Yuk Hui and The Otolith Group's own practice, participants were invited to think beyond Western technological frameworks and consider how different cultures encode knowledge, agency, and life into objects, images, and moving pictures. How does a film breathe? What does it mean for an image to be made alive?

“The idea was to pose a set of questions whose answers we ourselves do not necessarily know... It's a space of theory, and practice and research in which we are all embarked upon asking questions to these subjects and using these subjects to ask questions about our world.”

— Kodwo Eshun

The week also included visits to Zeitz MOCCA — the largest museum of contemporary art on the continent — led by members of the museum's curatorial staff. The visit was particularly resonant as AFMAC prepares for an exhibition at the space opening in December 2026, bringing together work by lead artists whose practice has been central to the Collective's journey across the continent: Zeresenay Berhane Mehari, Mati Diop, Jim Chuchu, Wanuri Kahiu, and The Otolith Group.

“For us, the platform of thinking with the history of cinema and with the gallery is to slow things down ... and think about the politics of militant cinema, third cinema, Tricontinental cinema, French New Wave, Indian Parallel Cinema, Japanese cinema, Korean cinema, art cinema around the world, but then find a way to think with images for ourselves. We are thinking in the way that history and images have affected us and affected society and affected politics.”

—Anjalika Sagar

What AFMAC has built over the course of a year—from the first gathering at FESPACO in Ouagadougou to the final workshops in Cape Town—is a beginning. Both a Pan-African collaboration and liberator exercise, it aims to imagine new conditions of creation and unearth new modes of making and being together.