The Citizen Canvas is a short film produced for the 2024 UTA-Do workshop by the collective, @ajabuajabu1630. A beautiful visual chronicle of Dar es Salaam is assembled, and brings together many of this city’s landscapes, practices and histories.
Wangui Kimari gives a brief background about the film: “For our UTA-Do workshop processes, we also take instruction from local artists and how they live and document their experiences in their cities. The objective is to contribute to re-narrations of this metropolis from its margins, documenting, at once, the dependable and ironic violence of “independence,” but, as well, the understanding that cities like Dar es Salaam can also be ‘a laboratory of what freedom might be.” The film was screened at the inaugural Africa Urban Forum in September 2024, with a discussion facilitated by two participants from the 2023 and 2024 workshops.
About UTA-Do
UTA-Do is a yearly critical urban studies ‘summer school’ that aims to contribute to making African urban scholarship and imagination more inclusive, and primarily through working to democratise access to the resources required to shape and produce information about African cities. UTA-Do brings together emerging scholars, artists, and activists around the shared project of thinking and doing the urban.The core of the program is a one week annual workshop with between 30 and 40 participants. The workshop program includes deep theoretical debates, writing exercises, career mentorship, field trips, and corporeal arts immersions – underpinned by a recognition of the multifaceted nature of the urban theory making project. These closed spaces are supplemented with public events which home in on more specific themes related to contemporary African urban issues. The events reinforce each other, creating a rich ecosystem of debate, care, and visibility.
Watch the short film on Youtube
