LIAS Symposium: "World-making Experiments with Art and Literature"

Date: Wednesday 21 to Friday 22 May 2026, 9.30 a-m.–3 p.m.
Place: Campus | Libeskind Building Forum

This workshop brings together a selection of East and Southern African writers and visual artists whose work grapples with the affordances of audio visual and narrative art, to provide alternative visions of world-making in impossible times. The workshop is interested in the ways this set of artists and writers tap into artistic imaginaries— through literary, filmic and visual arts— to offer compelling critiques of particular temporalities and subjectivities in East and South African encounters with repetitive cycles of unhumaning, at different junctures across history. At the same time, in their work, each of these artists rejects the easy embrace of despair, and mobilises the imagination as a powerful tool — both aesthetic and political — with which to populate the East and Southern African imaginariums with different forms of what an otherwise can look like; even when conventional narratives and histories spell defeat. It is this set of political and aesthetic imaginings of what might be called otherwise imaginariums that this workshop is interested in exploring. The workshop proceeds from an understanding of artistic imagination as vested with the capacity to conceptualise possibilities and configure lifeworlds beyond the limits of exclusionary status quos; towards liveable futures.  These are the world-making possibilities of artistic imagination that we set out to explore in this workshop. 

Through a series of reflections, readings, film-screenings and discussions, the workshop sets these artists, and their respective bodies of work in conversation. At the center of the workshop are writers, filmmakers and visual artists drawn from East and Southern Africa.

Each of these artists’ work uses artistic imagination to confront  fundamental questions relating to the unfinished business of violent political histories and presents; the promises and betrayals of liberation projects in Africa and its diasporas; the ongoing catastrophes of extractive capital in the world; as well as migrant lifeworlds, in a time when unfolding polycrises render precarious communities even more disposable. At the same time, each artist’s work features a deep preoccupation with different inter-disciplinary dialogues between literary narrative and art, as crucial modes of world-making and meaning making in contemporary Africa. 

Thursday 21 May 2026
Campus, Libeskind Building, Forum 

09.30–10.00 a.m.
Workshop opening remarks:  Grace A. Musila & Vera-Simone Schulz

10–11.15 a.m.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: “Entangled Cartographies: Crafting the Myths of Us”
Respondent: Russel West-Pavlov, University of Tübingen

11.45 a.m.–12.45 p.m.
Maaza Mengiste: “Writing Through the Lens: Literature and Photography”
Q&A: Moderated by Vera-Simone Schulz

13.45–15 pm
“Screening and Discussion of Muna Mussie’s Cinema Impero”
Respondent: Naima Hassan, Curator, Berlin

15.15–16.30 p.m. 
Mshaï Mwangola: “Leso Lessons for World-Making in Impossible Times”
Respondent: Clarissa Vierke, University of Bayreuth

Friday 22 May 2026
Campus, Libeskind Building, Forum 

09.30–10.45 a.m.
Muna Mussie: “The Embroidered Book – Punteggiatura”
Respondent: Betiel Anghesom Negash, University of Chieti-Pescara

11.15–12.30 a.m.
Film Screening: Mother’s Day by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Zimbabwe, 2005, 30 mins., OmeU
Response and discussion: Pepetual Mforbe Chiangong, University of Bayreuth

13.30–14.30 p.m. 
Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese in Conversation with LIAS Alumna Grace A. Musila

14.30–15 p.m. 
Closing Reflections