Mapping how ‘diabolical architectures’ of colonial materialism hold open Africa as a continent for extraction, Kathryn Yusoff, Kerry Holden, Casper Laing Ebbensgaard, and Michael Salu explore how this legacy of infrastructural space and imaginary practices continues today. Based on their research in the Rhodes archives, their collaborative work responds to the erosion of histories that underwrote the territorial advance of imperial greed. The European dream of a portal to expand time and space, imagined at a continental scale, placed Africa into a vortex of racial debt relations and extraction. This planetary portal, with its emancipatory promises of transformation of the African continent rising, from speculative finance to material infrastructures continues in the present. Attending to the relation between the mine and the organisation of calculative life in the recursive tail of race and colonialism, Planetary Portals considers colonialism as an ongoing present. Diving into the time-space praxis of colonial history and the on-going shadows of its worlding, the group explores the process of taking this portal apart – destabilising points of stabilisation, and disrupting legacies of time and space that hold.

The lecture-performance accompanied by moving image works is followed by a moderated conversation between the group and Helen Pritchard.