In late 2015, we founded the Black Athena Collective, a research and artis-tic laboratory for experimentation that engages political discourse and practices of spatial construction connected to the Red Sea region from Eritrea to Egypt. The collective was born out of a need to address mobility as a crucial principle for structuring new approaches to territorial conven-tion, citizenship and politicization. Through multi-disciplinary perspec-tives including geography, sociology and history, the Black Athena Col-lective addresses the dominant territorial logics and constitution of place versus the transience of individuals; it looks specifically at architecture(s) in relation to errant bodies. Architecture, in this case, is considered in terms of wider ethical and political principles.

The collective draws from challenges posed by Martin Bernal’s thesis which questions methodological assumptions embedded within Western historiography. We are specifically interested in confronting the Euro-cen-tric bias of landscape discourse: “[i]s it possible that landscape, under-stood as the historical ‘invention’ of a new visual/pictorial medium, is inte-grally connected with imperialism?”. Our approach opposes the predatory view of landscape discourse, especially within the context of colonialism on the African continent. Rather, a new discourse on visual responses to landscape of the region is necessary, one that does not engage the conti-nent as a fixed category but rather as an uneven and entangled terrain where conceptual operations are assembled and contested. We speak of a migration of images and their constructions as transitory forms moving across ‘bounded’ spaces. Can our methodology allow us to achieve more complex and definitive ways of thinking and interacting with land?

The Black Athena Collective was founded in 2015 by artists Heba Y. Amin (EGY) and Dawit L. Petros (ER/CA).