Africa Is a Country

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

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.