About

The magazine emerges from the intersections between Black agency, contemporary arts and cities, with the aim of producing and circulating knowledge with the potency of rescuing our futures from the hands of capital.

We welcome you by sharing a few notes that contextualise some of the choices we've made thus far, though they are not permanent, rigid or unchangeable.

The word waithood was a gift from anthropologist Alcinda Honwana, who uses it as a social concept descriptor of the liminal phase young people go through when transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Waithood is used to signal a state of undesirable prolonged adolescence, and is often comprehended as a product of failed neoliberal and global socio-economic political crises. This state of instability mobilises the youth to flirt with the realms of informality and improvisations, turning this phase of their lives into a site for experimentation.

Here, at the magazine, waithood is located in this site of experimentation, where we plant seeds to birth a new possibility for the adult. This act of refusal holds the potency to break free from limits imposed by colonial imagination.

This approach presents us with the following possibilities:

• To articulate and appreciate analytical tools from which new vocabularies begin to be needed and emerge, bearing in mind that 'the language of colonialism can only (re)produce the conditions of colonialism;
• To understand time as an exploratory resource, deeply implicated by space, so implicated that the magazine encourages time travels;
• To pay attention to Black subjectivity and its operation modes, consequently fostering and crafting a Black sensibility that acknowledges a "we" not limited to national or geographical constraints, a "we" that sees itself in others.

We choose the format of a magazine for what its flexibility offers in the inevitable moments when we have to negotiate with the colonial authority (who remains present and is activated by the languages we are using here to communicate). The possibility of deciding what a magazine can be is exciting and enables us a way of escaping from the constraints of modern definitions.

How we see the magazine changes according to context. In this issue, we see the object as a travelling exhibition more than a "book". The choice to not bind it, allows that some pages detach from an idea of a "central body" in a sense. It also allows the reader to tear everything apart and propose a new order. Some pages can be placed on a wall or in another unpredictable format, we encourage you to do what you need to do, to best engage with this.