Reading Room
Listening session with AFRIKADAA and Station of Commons
A selection of archives and audio pieces produced with the AFRIKADAA collective and Radio Station of Commons as part of the African Art Book Fair.
Listening Session with Jessie Cox on Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices
This program expands on Jessie Cox’s latest publication, Sounds of Black Switzerland: Blackness, Music, and Unthought Voices (Duke University Press, 2025). Writing as a composer and Black Swiss scholar, Cox listens through sound to the experience of Black life in Switzerland, drawing on work by musicians such as DJ Maïté Chénière, clarinetist Jérémie Jolo, and rapper Nativ, alongside composer Charles Uzor's pieces written for George Floyd. Moving past what can be directly heard, the project confronts anti-Blackness in a nation often claimed to be race-free, reshaping how citizenship, immigration, gender, kinship, and belonging are thought in relation to Blackness. For this program Jessie Cox curated an exclusive extended playlist of music that engages with these questions in Switzerland.
Jam conversation on Candomblé: Sacred Rhythms in Brazil, with FLEE Project
Upon their arrival in Brazil after the traumatic Atlantic crossing, enslaved populations from West Africa rebuilt their sacred systems and created a resilient and evolving religion known as Candomblé. This program explores that history through Candomblé: Sacred Rhythms in Brazil, a project by FLEE Project that includes a bilingual book and a double vinyl compilation. Editors Alan Marzo and Olivier Duport will address critical questions regarding sacred sound as an archive and the ethical challenges of publishing ritual material. The listening session will feature a dialogue between archival recordings from the Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú terreiro and newly commissioned works by contemporary artists like DJ Anderson do Paraiso and Xexa. The program concludes with an open discussion that bridges historical preservation with modern artistic transformation.
About the Reading Room
The Pan-African Library, curated by Pascale Obolo, draws from the ten-year archive of the African Art Book Fair (AABF) to present various histories of independent publishing across Africa and its diasporas. This Reading Room traces how autonomous infrastructures of knowledge operate beyond institutional geographies that have historically organized visibility, legitimacy, and circulation.
We begin with the simple proposition: books never exist alone. Every publication carries with it conversations, oral traditions, friendships, political struggles, acts of translation, and communities of care. The Reading Room creates a map of these ecologies of social relations and argues that publishing is an infrastructure that enacts cultural repair and epistemic disobedience.
The installation features a curated selection of contemporary independent African titles, archives of important publications, listening stations, artwork, and importantly—space to read and rest. Alongside the 10th anniversary of the African Art Book Fair are histories of the magazine Peuple noir, peuple africains, founded by the Cameroonian thinker Mongo Beti; the 15th anniversary of the journal Mosaïques; a history of the Nigerian cultural center The Mbari Club; and the 5th anniversary of the double-dummy édition newspaper. NYABF exhibitors are also invited to contribute thematically relevant titles to a non-circulating library available for browsing throughout the weekend.
The daily program schedule in the Reading Room features collaborations with local and international writers, artists, and activists, including Station of Commons, iwalewabooks, the Fantastic Four Double Dutch, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, FLEE Project, We Make Books, and AFRIKADAA, among many others. This interdisciplinary format—with programming ranging from listening sessions, group discussions, and performances—emphasizes collaboration as a primary method uniting independent publishing practices. In doing so, The Pan-African Library refuses the silence traditionally associated with libraries, while contrasting the rapid pace of the Fair with an opportunity to engage in downtime, close reading, critique, and reflection.
As a partner of the Reading Room, Station of Commons, a transdisciplinary collective of artists, designers, and coders working on digital commons, will broadcast from the Fair on their own radio infrastructure at stationofcommons.org and on the Printed Matter website.
This Reading Room: The Pan-African Library is supported by Aalto University School of the Arts, Design and Architecture; Consulate General of Finland in New York; Consulate General of Switzerland in New York; Finnish Cultural Foundation; Frame Contemporary Art Finland; Goethe Institut; and is part of Villa Albertine post-residency program in partnership with Albertine Foundation.