Two Markets

The research project Two Markets opens portals into two sub-Saharan marketplaces: Kariakoo in Dar es Salaam and Merkato in Addis Ababa.¹ Both sites, understood as material assemblages and social structures, articulate opacities that are necessary to resist local and global regimes of surveillance. Through images and texts, Two Markets unsettles imperial grand narratives that produce static understandings of African cities—dominant projections that oscillate between celebrations of mid-century European interventions and exoticization of “informality.” Two Markets, instead, confronts the impossibility of having to see through the overbearing shadow of colonialism by exposing the limits and failures of architectural representation itself.