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Digital Documentation of African Cultural Heritage, Friday, March 3

Image of the event flyerAs Black History Month draws to a close, the A3-Archnet collaboration to document African architecture is starting a week of workshops at MIT that will conclude on Friday with a public presentation on Friday, March 3, at 3 pm in The Nexus of Hayden Library.  It will also be streamed live on Zoom. The in-person event is free and open to the public. Registration is required for the webinar.

Photograph of the A3 participants in front of the MIT seal

From Left to right: Anthony Baba Oladeji, Muhammed Madandola, Abdullah Ogunsetan, and Adefola Toye.

The participants in the workshops-Muhammed Madandola, recipient of a degree in architecture from the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology in Nigeria and a Master’s in Islamic art, architecture, and urbanism from Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar; Abdullah Ogunsetan, a final-year student of Architecture at the University of Lagos, Nigeria; and Adefola Toye,  a Ph.D. student at the University of Liverpool’s School of Architecture-were prize winners in a contest for writing about architecture held in 2020.

Led by Nigerian architect Baba Oladeji, A3: Archives of African Architectures is a project to create multimedia archives documenting African architecture across the continent to raise awareness of the importance of the built environment to cultural heritage and the role of the architect in society.  

Archnet is a project of the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture to document the built environment of Muslim societies in the broadest sense of the term.

Documentation produced by the collaboration will be made available both on the A3 platform and on Archnet. The workshops will be followed by a Virtual Biennale to be held in Lagos at a date soon to be announced.

In 2019, the collaboration received a MISTI Global Seed Fund grant to partially fund the workshops and a Virtual Biennale. During the week at MIT, participants will be introduced to strategies for establishing and expanding archival collections, explore platforms for showcasing built heritage, and develop strategies for moving the project forward.

The current set of workshops was preceded by online events held during the pandemic. More than 40 sites were documented during that period.


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