Signals from Other Cities (thursday)

“Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Kinshasa, Durban. In these cities, the future did not arrive as a clean architectural promise, but as noise, speed, pressure, improvisation, abundance. Here, modernity is unruly: shaped by informal economies, mobile phones, cheap cameras, cracked software, religious intensity, roadside studios, and overloaded sound systems.

In this programme, what may appear broken when measured against Western fantasies of order reveals itself as a system of invention — resilient, unstable, social, excessive, and full of strange joy. These videos are haunted by infrastructure, memory, and survival, yet they are not trapped in nostalgia. Instead they point toward parallel futures, built from friction, from obsolete technologies pushed beyond their intended use, from scenes inventing themselves in real time

Within Hauntopolis, these works arrive as signals from other cities. Their ghosts are not only remnants of lost futures, but messengers of futures still struggling to come into being.”
–Arlen Dilzisian, curator

Nyege Nyege is a Ugandan record label, festival and cultural accelerator based in Kampala. Emerging from an underground party and artist community, it has grown into one of the most important platforms for experimental music from Africa and beyond, connecting local scenes with global networks while remaining rooted in collaboration, risk-taking and sonic discovery.