AfricaIs aCountry

Google's Art Project

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Google's Art Project

By
Tom Devriendt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKPeN3ZNCOE

Google’s new Art Project makes use of the street-view technology to take us by the hand through some of the better known museums around the world. There’s the Tate Britain and The National Gallery in London, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Uffizi in Florence. There’s Prague, Berlin, Washington DC, Madrid, Amsterdam… Marvelous. The Museum of Marrakech, The National Museum in Lagos and The Nairobi National Museum? The museums in Cairo or Johannesburg? Not just yet. Street View works fine in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, so it can’t be too hard to pay a visit to one of their museums, can it? Which ones do we want to see included?

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.