Speculative Cartographies

Abstract

There are far too few studies on Namibian art and artists in the diaspora. In response to this, I look at the work of Herman Mbamba, Jackson Wahengo and Shishani Vranckx. Mbamba is a visual artist based in Haugesund, Norway while musicians Wahengo and Vranckx are based in Copenhagen, Denmark and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, respectively. I offer an aesthetic reading, unpacking their work as counter-hegemonic maps, that signal the places of imagining otherwise. Wahengo and Vranckx’s songs lean towards national cultural memory while Mbamba’s abstract and figurative paintings conceal everyday realities. The concept of speculative cartography is applied, to read how these artists as African Diasporic subjects, speak to historic displacements and scatterings, while orientating themselves within national cultural memory that goes beyond ‘Namibianess’ or the African Diaspora. I argue that the speculative cartographies generate Thirdspaces that collapse binaries between settled and unsettled, imaginable and unimaginable, material and metaphysical spaces.