This week has been a pretty busy one, both for me and for the world it seems. I would start by sharing with you a couple of interesting articles about this Tunisami that has hit North Africa in the last couple of weeks. So here we go with The Economist both on Egypt, where the protests don’t seem likely to stop any soon, and Tunisia, with the magazine exploring the possible future scenarios for these countries. Here you can find some beautiful images about the protests in Cairo.
Sudan also seems to want a piece of the cake, or at least its students do, but the government puts on the optimistic face and reassure that any Tunisian-inspired uprising aimed at forcing President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to step down, amount to nothing. Just a little reminder about the situation in the days before the Tunisami hit Egypt, not that they weren’t warned.
While Northern Africa uprise, US call for transition and France warns the rest of the continent, Italian minister Frattini finally pronounces himself after being a little distracted, doing his part trying to keep this government together through gossips and more scandals, but that’s just the Italian way isn’t it?
This week I have also added a couple of links to my list: African Digital Art is a nice directory for design and art, through their website I have discovered this neat publication by the STT Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends and illustrated by Roquefort, that is surely going to be one of my reads in the very near future. If you’re also interested you can buy or download it (legally and in its integral version) from STT’s site. They also promote events like this one, so thumbs up!
If you’re in NY this spring, you might consider attending this series of lectures called Sightlines: New Perspectives on African Architecture and Urbanism by the Institute of African Studies of the Columbia University, the first discussion featured the Senegalese artist Viye Diba – this is a short clip about his work:
The next one will be on Wednesday, March 23 and will be featuring Labelle Prussin discussing about Jewish influence on West African Architecture.
Talking about new perspectives for urbanism and landscape The Guardian has just released this new podcast about land grabbing, a subject that, in my opinion, is fundamental to understand properly what is happening in some Sub-Saharan Africa countries like Ethiopia (where land can be leased for as little as $1 an acre and land rights don’t represent much of a problem) but also Mali and Sudan.
