World-Making Experiments with Art and Literature.

This workshop brings together a selection of East and Southern African writers and visual artists whose work grapples with the affordances of audio visual and narrative art, to provide alternative visions of world-making in impossible times. The workshop is interested in the ways this set of artists and writers tap into artistic imaginaries— through literary, filmic and visual arts— to offer compelling critiques of particular temporalities and subjectivities in East and South African encounters with repetitive cycles of unhumaning, at different junctures across history. At the same time, in their work, each of these artists rejects the easy embrace of despair, and mobilises the imagination as a powerful tool — both aesthetic and political — with which to populate the East and Southern African imaginariums with different forms of what an otherwise can look like; even when conventional narratives and histories spell defeat. It is this set of political and aesthetic imaginings of what might be called otherwise imaginariums that this workshop is interested in exploring. The workshop proceeds from an understanding of artistic imagination as vested with the capacity to conceptualise possibilities and configure lifeworlds beyond the limits of exclusionary status quos; towards liveable futures. These are the world-making possibilities of artistic imagination that we set out to explore in this workshop.

Wednesday 20 May 2026

18h30 - 20h15: The Worldmaking Promise of Literary Imagination: An Evening with Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, at Heinrich Heine House, Lüneburg

18h30 – 18h40: Welcome and Introduction

18h40 - 19h20: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor in conversation with Vera-Simone Schulz

19h20 - 19h30: Comfort Break

19h20 - 20h15: Tsitsi Dangarembga in conversation with Grace A Musila

20h15 – 20h30: Book signing | Lünebuch Bookstand

Thursday 21 May 2026

Venue: Forum, Central Building, Leuphana University

09h30 – 10h00: Workshop opening remarks: Grace A. Musila & Vera-Simone Schulz

10h00 – 11h15: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor: Entangled Cartographies: Crafting the Myths of us
Respondent: Russel West-Pavlov, University of Tübingen

11h15 – 11h45: Tea/Coffee Break

11h45 – 12h45: Maaza Mengiste: Writing through the Lens: Literature and Photography
Q&A: Moderated by Vera-Simone Schulz

12h45 – 13h45: Lunch

13h45 – 15h00: Screening and Discussion of Muna Mussie’s Cinema Impero
Respondent: Naima Hassan, Managing Editor, Contemporary And, Berlin

15h00 – 15h15: Tea/Coffee Break

15h15 – 16h30: Mshaï Mwangola: Leso Lessons for World-Making in Impossible Times
Respondent: Clarissa Vierke, University of Bayreuth

19h00 – 21h30: Scala Cinema, Lüneburg

Film Screening: Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s Ancestral Visions of the Future
Q&A with Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese moderated by Grace A Musila

Friday 22 May 2026

Venue: Forum, Central Building, Leuphana University

09h30 -10h45: Muna Mussie: The Embroidered Book - Punteggiatura
Respondent: Betiel Anghesom Negash, The Recovery Plan

10h45h – 11h15: Coffee Break

11h15 – 12h30: Film Screening: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Mother’s Day
Response and discussion: Pepetual Mforbe Chiangong, University of Bayreuth

12h30 – 13h30: Lunch break

13h30 – 14h30: Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese in Conversation with Grace A. Musila

14h30 – 15h00: Closing Reflections

15h00: Farewell Drinks

A Symposium at Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS), organized by LIAS Alumna Grace A. Musila (University of the Witwatersrand) and LIAS Faculty Fellow Vera-Simone Schulz (Leuphana Universität Lüneburg / KHI Florenz).

All parts of the symposium are free and open to the public:

https://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/lias/news/events/single-view/2026/05/20/the-worldmaking-promise-of-literary-imagination.html

https://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/lias/news/events/single-view/2026/05/21/lias-film-series-ancestral-visions-of-the-future.html

https://www.leuphana.de/en/research-centers/lias/news/events/single-view/2026/05/21/lias-symposium-world-making-experiments-with-art-and-literature.html