Reading Room
Reading Ecology: Transforming Publishing in Africa, with iwalewabooks, TJ Benson, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, Ese Emmanuel, Nadine Siegert, and Pascale Obolo
This conversation centers on Reading Ecology: Transforming Publishing in Africa, a project exploring contemporary independent publishing and knowledge circulation across the African continent. Part of the We Make Books initiative, it highlights researchers, writers, and cultural actors reimagining how books are produced and distributed in Africa. Participants discuss the challenges of this evolving ecology, including alternative models and solidarity networks. Reading Ecology proposes the publication as a site of resistance, dialogue, and collective imagination rather than just a finished object. By examining current publishing practices, the conversation reflects on how reading and transmission serve as vital acts of cultural reappropriation, envisioning new territories of knowledge and the construction of shared futures. This program is made possible through funding from The Goethe-Institut in Lagos, Nigeria, as a part of the We Make Books project.
Jam conversation with the Fantastic Four Double Dutch: Delores Brown Finlayson, De'Shone Adams Goodson, Robin Oakes Watterson, and Adrienne "Nikki" Adams Howell
This special conversation brings together the legendary Fantastic Four Double Dutch, the pioneering New York team that turned Double Dutch from a neighborhood practice into an international phenomenon. The iconic group’s first appearance in Paris as part of the New York City Rap Tour marked a decisive moment in hip-hop's transatlantic history, inspiring curator and filmmaker Pascale Obolo to found Dutch Force System in 1983, the first Double Dutch crew in France. This jam session revisits that shared history while restoring the central role of Black women whose contributions have too often been invisible in dominant narratives of hip-hop. Through conversation, archival memories, and rap classics from the early 1980s, the program reconnects New York and Paris, revealing Double Dutch as a practice at once athletic, choreographic, musical, and political. It emphasizes the significance of cultural transmission and resurfaces overlooked genealogies of the women whose creativity helped shape the global language of hip-hop.
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.