Making Art Work: Articulating Art and Urban Marginality in Kisumu, Kenya

This dissertation offers an inquiry into the role and reach of artistic practices in Kisumu, Kenya’s 3rd-largest city, where young people have en masse embraced the way-of-the-artist. The thesis combines anthropology with urban studies, sociology, fine and performing art studies and literary studies and weaves the many little threads of how the artists “make meaning” into a larger fabric – that is, the city as a social and political space. The dissertation is concerned with the ways in which art is made; with these ways and the practices they entail as alternatives to work construed as a salaried or regular endeavor; and with both the processes and the final products involved as building blocks of city life. The text uses the notion of Lebenskünstler as a nodal point, which, literally translated, stands for somebody who is a master in the art of living. In so doing, the thesis extends bridges between such key takes on city-making as are offered by urban sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone, literary and cultural studies theorists such as Sarah Nuttall and art historian Joanna Grabski. The thesis follows five individual artists through their work and life world. It builds on a post-Marxist understanding of discursive articulation and highlights how the artists concerned develop different articulatory responses to the structural-violence they experience as a result of enduring mass unemployment and a systemic neglect on behalf of the powers that be. These artistic articulations take different forms and draw on various art genres ranging from ‘artivism’ to spoken word to fashion modelling, as well as various communicative and performative expressions that are part of social media culture. The doctoral research was carried out between 2015 and 2018 and the thesis addresses how artists reacted to the highly-contested general elections of 2017 and the country’s subsequent constitutional crisis. Unseld’s account is neither silent on the violence that his protagonists experienced so often and that sometimes pushed them into criminal milieus, nor does it belittle their attempts to overcome the many hurdles that they had and still have to face. The thesis always recognizes that the portrayed artists are both authors of their life trajectories and victims of the circumstances that prevail in the urban neighborhoods that they inhabit. Using the device of portraiture, Unseld manages to write an account that is both balanced in its analytical propositions and a moving narrative about hope and despair in the city. The thesis opens up many important and timely questions about the multi-layered nature of the articulation between city-making and art-making, while simultaneously expanding our understanding of what the term “art” can reference in post-colonial life-worlds in the 21st century

Aesthetics of Articulation

Art and social space are not conceivable one without another. Nevertheless, only little research has so far addressed this relationship of creative and social practice and its political and aesthetic implications in urban Africa and its global entanglement. Often, art is conceived either as apolitical practice of beautification and decoration in times of peace or as deeply political in times of unrest and oppression. This applies particularly to African settings that tend to be perceived as sites of crisis while evading the attention of mostly Western-centric art theory. It is therefore of particular importance to understand artistic articulation as a social and creative practice that operates also beyond moments of political and conflictual emergency. In what ways does art articulate social and political imagination, and how does artistic practice relate to such social and collective visions? How does articulation work and in what ways is it generative of visual, oral and performative aesthetics? We have addressed these questions in highly diverse cities in East and West Africa that have experienced different levels of political conflict and forms of cultural activity in the last years. The presented three essays are reflective not only of different traditions and cultures of artistic, political and social expression, but also of the fascinating range of methodological approaches to the topic that social anthropology has on offer for both, the actual process of the study and the presentation of its results. Beyond being empirical studies of aesthetic and political articulation, the three essays also speak to theories of articulation. They embrace politics, aesthetics, and not least the formation of social urban space

Rhythms of the unemployed: Making art and making do through spoken word in Kisumu, Kenya

Young people from the low-income settlements in Kenya's third-largest city, Kisumu, struggling with unemployment refer to their efforts to generate a livelihood as ‘hustling’. At the same time, many of them put art (dance, music, poetry) at the centre of their lives. This article attempts to account for the significant popularity of the arts among Kisumu's youth. It understands the ‘way of the artist’ as an alternative interpretation of work and a framework in which people situate their experiences of unemployment, waiting and insecure work. To examine this framework in action, the article follows Janabii, a poet who has been at the centre of attempts to establish a spoken word scene in Kisumu. Janabii has spent several years in limbo, oscillating between glittering performances and a more discreet daily life, marked by functional homelessness and a refusal to surrender to the violence of Kenya's informal world of work. The article contributes to recent studies about hustling by combining an ethnography of a week in Janabii's life with a literary analysis of excerpts from one of his poems, in order to elucidate how his struggles to get by are narrated and stylized through a spoken word, artistic imaginary that interrelates with his everyday life