Discussion: Asutsuare Rebound
Panel
July 7, 2023
Asutsuare, Ghana
Speakers: Paulina Addison, Michael Gameli Dziwornu, Eric Don-Arthur, Vida Otoo, Łukasz Stanek
After Ghana’s independence in 1957, the village of Asutsuare became the focus of state-led, socialist-inspired agricultural and industrial development. A sugar factory was built, along with a residential area, a sugarcane plantation, and an irrigation system. Twenty years after its closure in the 1980s, the plant was bought by Chinese investors. Today, it manufactures paper and plastic products, while the sugar cane plantation was repurposed for the farming of rice, bananas, and fish. Asutsuare Rebound, first presented at the Rotterdam Biennale of Architecture (2022), studies the reuse, reappropriation, and revalorisation of modernist planning in Asutsuare. We have interviewed retired employees of the sugar factory and younger inhabitants who explained to us how the material infrastructure and memories of the plant are a resource for imagining and producing a collective future. By juxtaposing their voices with images by photographer Eric Don-Arthur, this project revisits the ambiguous impact of long-term planning on the landscapes of Asutsuare, including water management, agriculture, and social infrastructure. We understand these ambiguities not as evidence of failure, but as an invitation to rethink the future beyond both modernist techno-utopias and neoliberal short-termism.
Topics: Archival Justice, Oblique Histories, Land Imaginaries
Convenors:
Łukasz Stanek and Michael Gameli Dziwornu
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