Parallel Exposure. Counter- Culture and Coloniality from Vienna to Dakar

This talk revisits transformative concepts of the sixties regarding new media, urban renewal, psychedelic art, and cybernetics from the vantage point of postcolonial critique. It situates this constellation in the writings of South African artist Selby Mvusi, specifically in papers he worked on for an international design congress in Vienna 1965 and FESMAN in Dakar 1966. At that point Mvusi’s focus had shifted from his artistic practice toward applied arts and pedagogy, conceiving of the pioneering program Man/Environ at University College Nairobi. Drawing on interdisciplinary curricula such as the Bauhaus, Mvusi calibrated his program in response to architectural and socio-economic vernaculars of newly independent Kenya. In reevaluating his ideas in relation to the Vienna conference’s theme Design and the Community, the lecture discusses how Mvusi transposed his research into African material culture and aesthetics in the postcolonial realm onto the postindustrial and counter-cultural discourse of the Cold War Western sphere.