Reading Room
Carte Blanche—a discussion and workshop on the library shelf at the first Mbari Club, with TJ Benson, Ese Emmanuel, Raimi Gbadamosi, iwalewabooks (Nadine Siegert and Katharina Fink), kara lynch, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Smooth Ugochukwu Nzewi, Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (OlongoAfrica)
The Mbari Club was a center for multidisciplinary cultural activities composed of African writers, artists, and musicians, founded in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1961 by Ulli Beier with a group of young writers, notably Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. Its name, "Mbari," is an Igbo concept suggested by Achebe, inspired by Mbari art.
We begin this program with an act of imagination: picturing the library shelf at the first Mbari Club in Ibadan, 1962. Which books rested there, and which stories found resonance or sparked tension—carrying divergent visions of art, history, and African creativity? Which spines are worn from use, and which remain nearly untouched?
Through this speculative lens, we turn to the aesthetic, intellectual, and everyday archives that shaped Mbari's emergence—attending to what is missing as much as to what remains, to loosen the often solidified "Mbari story." Speculation becomes a strategy of care: a way of feeling through absences and unrecorded conversations. The Speculative Shelf imagines the Mbari archive as porous and non-linear—neither sealed in 1962 nor confined to one geography—inviting books, media, and objects born long after Mbari to join its constellation. In doing so, the project folds those 1962 moments into our own time: a living, circulating current of thought, encounter, and renewal.
Listening Session on music as a space for healing
This concluding program offers space to reflect on the significance of music and sound in healing practices.
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.