Latitude is guest fellow at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, where we are invited to participate at the Research Project “Future Africa – Visions in Time” with the working group “Appropriating Natures for the Future: Africa and Beyond”.

Latitude will work on the human–environment (conflictual) relations and the African context seen through the Western lens, with particular attention to the tension between cultural images of cities and landscapes, and the built urban and “natural” spaces. This constant tension, that we can read both today and in the past, has generated different iconographies as well as different physical spaces at all scales, where nature has various degrees of domestication. Moreover, the rapid transformations that affect the main urban centers and the impact of new infrastructures and investors force us to reflect on the upcoming paradigms that drive those changes.

The aim will be investigating the relation between the construction of cities in lusophone countries and the interpretation/domestication of Nature through a wide range of iconographic material available in the archives and library.