AFROPOLIS 2027 | RE/MEMBERING THE FUTURE

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

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FESTAC ’77 marks a defining moment in the Afrotopian imagination. The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture can be remembered as a monumental spectacle. A moment when Black and African peoples gathered at planetary scale to imagine themselves otherwise. Fifty years later, its scale has proven difficult to reproduce, its archive remains dispersed and its memory resists full recovery. Its meaning, still unfolding.

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FESTAC was not designed to be repeated, but to be remembered as possibility. In the decades since, we have searched for language. Blaxploitation. Afropessimism. Afrofuturism. Postcoloniality. Decoloniality. Afrotopia. Each, in its own way, frames a persistent question: Who are we becoming now? Together they reveal the tensions and contradictions within African and diasporic imaginaries, while culture itself continues to reconfigure how societies organise meaning, memory and belonging.

For a long time, culture was treated through two dominant logics: preservation and production. We preserved monuments. We produced content. We measured attendance, exports, visibility, ticket sales and streaming metrics. Heritage on one side. Creative Industry on the other.

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Over the past ten years, from DanceGATHERING to Afropolis, we have been rehearsing a different question:

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What if culture is not representation, but infrastructure?
What if culture is not what we show, but what we build together?

FESTAC ’77 emerged through a largely centralised architecture of state patronage, national representation and monumental cultural production. Nollywood and Afrobeats demonstrated another possibility: culture could multiply, travel and scale through markets, informal networks, bodies and digital platforms. Yet circulation is not connection. Visibility is not belonging.

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Culture 3.0 proposes another threshold, where the distance between producer and audience collapses and cultural value extends towards what culture changes: the relationships it generates, the knowledge it activates, the communities it sustains.

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Culture becomes operational. Museums become convening nodes. Theatres become civic spaces. Archives come alive again. In an age of algorithmic abundance and accelerating technological and ecological change, culture offers context, coherence, presence and meaning. Data can inform. Technology can scale. Culture interprets. Culture teaches a society how to feel together.

And so, as we traverse FESTAC @50, we listen differently.

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What did FESTAC open that we have not yet sustained?

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Afropolis 2027 works with what remains: fragments, archives, bodies, gatherings, memories and unfinished relationships. If FESTAC imagined an African Renaissance through extraordinary concentration and scale, we seek coherence through relation. Between Africans and our diasporas. Between generations. Between the living and the ancestral. Between memory and what is yet to come.

The past becomes material. A vocabulary. A tool. Something to work with.

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This is RE/MEMBERING THE FUTURE.

Re/membering is an attempt to gather what has been scattered, to restore connection and reassemble the body across histories, borders, languages and generations. The body that emerges will inevitably be different from the one dispersed.

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In 2027, Lagos becomes our meeting ground. Fifty years since FESTAC ’77. Sixty years since the beginning of the Nigerian Civil War. Ten editions since our first GATHERING.

Across ten days, these histories and futures will move through performances, installations, conversations, laboratories, archives, film, food, sound, ritual and technology; through G.A.V.E — Global African Vibez Exchange; through concerts and dance floors; through Biafra @60 and the difficult work of collective memory; through the Yorùbá Galaand its questions of restitution, guardianship and the living archive; and through encounters we cannot yet name.

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Because Afropolis has always depended on what people bring into the room.

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And so this is a call for participants.

Artists, dancers, musicians, writers, filmmakers, designers, researchers, technologists, architects, archivists, cultural workers, cooks, makers, thinkers and practices that resist easy categorisation.

Bring us finished works. But also propositions. Archives. Research. Experiments. Rituals. Technologies. Workshops. Installations. Conversations. Unfinished ideas.

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We are interested in what you are carrying.

What has been scattered?
What remains unresolved?
What deserves to be remembered?
What must we learn to forget?
What knowledge does the future still require from the past?
What relationships between Africa and its diasporas remain unfinished?
What can a gathering produce that survives the gathering itself?
What kind of ancestors are we becoming?

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The measure is subtler than spectacle, numbers, volume or noise. Do people feel seen? Can communities hold under pressure? Can we accommodate difference, contradiction, multiple access points and even chaos? Can culture make complexity navigable? Can we remain human inside systems that move faster than we do?

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Afropolis 2027 begins there.

With FESTAC ’77 as archive and provocation rather than blueprint. With Lagos as laboratory. With Africa and its diasporas as an unfinished relationship. With culture as something we make together and something that, in turn, makes us.

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RE/MEMBERING THE FUTURE is a remembering forward.

Bring your fragment.

Your archive.
Your practice.
Your unfinished question.
Your impossible proposition.

Let us see what kind of body we can build together.

 

Q.

Convener / Curator