Inflight Magazine #2 : Search, Research

Women on Aeroplanes—agency for flying ideas is an artistic research project, based on a framework and network that is necessarily constantly evolving and changing. It aims to gain a broader understanding of what independence and interdependence means.
Looking closely at the long history of transatlantic networks and the struggles for liberation, predating the process of independence on the African continent (and elsewhere), the project explores how women were always central to such networks and struggles, in which they played multiple roles. Their stories are however hardly told and their faces remain widely invisible. We aim to not only frame their various and heterogeneous contributions, politically and artistically, but also create new parameters and premises of narratives. To recall the notion of independence today necessarily means to address the gap between formal independence and a process of decolonisation that was simultaneously national and intranational, transnational and international and which remains, in many ways, incomplete.

A series of Inflight Magazines travel along the route of the unfolding international project.
Experimenting with the format, each issue becomes a light container for research-in-progress; at times a flying museum built upon each iteration of the project and connecting to the next.

Search, Research: Looking for ... someone, something is about setting in motion oneself or others, a machine, a place, ideas, doubts, papers. Often we don't know why we keep looking. Sometimes there is a decision to take it seriously, to keep in touch, to commit, to get involved. Decisions can acquire momentum. Looking for might lead to research—a search that keeps us attached and that changes the attention’s direction and meaning: to look at something again and again and again until we begin to see.

Contributions by Odun Orimolade, Ndidi Dike, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Seloua Luste Boulbina, Gladys Melina Kalichini, Lungiswa Gqunta, Jihan El-Tahri, Fatoumata Diabaté, Michael C. Vazquez, Garnette Cadogan.