This article surfaces five key working principles shared by five independent contemporary art spaces. Despite taking various forms, all operate as noncommercial platforms in fast-urbanizing African cities: Nairobi, Accra, Cairo, Addis Ababa, and Dar es Salaam. These key findings emerged from the study Platform/Plotform, in which I observed emblematic programming during fieldwork to each participant art space. My research method made correlations between the practices of participant spaces and their urban context, which induced the interrelated working principles between art and the city.1 The underlying premise is that such spaces innovate ways of doing that relate to material realities of everyday life in the continent, and this in turn has broader resonance beyond the art world for others also navigating conditions of accelerated flux. They offer ideas around future organizational forms through context-specific, participatory solutions, and they disrupt conventional notions of sustainability. In short, the research study considers how a platform might “plotform”—to borrow an evocative phrase from artist and academic Kodwo Eshun. At a 2015 London conference by Common Practice, which advocates for the small visual arts sector, Eshun said it was not a matter of size but rather of nested capacity, of “platforming” or “plotforming”—that is, holding durational conversations that form plots which solidify over time while simultaneously questioning themselves (Cruz 2016: 10–11).The key events, spaces, and host cities for Platform/Plotform comprised:Participant spaces were selected for a combination of geographical spread, operating model, host city fabric, and the capacity, willingness, and feasibility of participation, in addition to practical research constraints. Fieldwork visits were timed to coincide with already planned artistic programming reflective of the modus operandi of the space (Fig. 1). Fieldwork, where possible, also coincided with another unrelated public event that could offer an independent reading on the city; often this involved art in public space. I was a participant-observer in those events and formally interviewed key personnel running the spaces. I collected field notes, visuals, soundscrapes, and informal interviews along the way. The fieldwork was conducted at staggered intervals between July 2018 and May 2019, with planning and research for a year prior. A workshop in Cape Town with research participants and local stakeholders followed, in October 2019, to help calibrate results and share outcomes.2The research took place amid heightened international interest in contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora and offers a grounded perspective. That said, its intention was to surface some shared dynamics to contribute to a continental conversation rather than overtly engage framings superimposed from elsewhere. The study also coincided with instrumentalization of the arts in public policy on the continent, where the sector is increasingly viewed as an industry instead. In South Africa, for instance, the state's official arts sector strategy, “Mzansi's Golden Economy,” refers to economic growth, job creation, and foreign exchange earnings as value indicators. Independent spaces, in contrast, are noncommercial platforms that run according to nonprofit motives with a belief in art as a public good. Also called autonomous or self-organized spaces, sometimes offspaces, their definition varies, but usually they are located off the beaten track in mixed-use or industrial areas. Such spaces are often (but not always) artist-run and generally operate collaboratively. They have relative programming autonomy and a transversal relationship with the state, often with minimal or no public funding. This inadvertently aids experimental work that may find less traction in purely commercial or publicly funded spheres but presents an ongoing sustainability dilemma. The findings show a move towards hybrid funding strategies with greater local support and turning existing assets towards income generation rather than reliance upon a third party or foreign donor.In summary, the first principle—horizontality—reflects a collective and nonhierarchical organizational structure of independent spaces that is also evident in their polyphonic modes of curatorial expression and multivalent forms. Horizontality can also be understood as epistemic disobedience that privileges local know-how. Reuse, recovery, and repair literally and symbolically generate the next principle—second chance. Mobilities of different types inform the third principle—performativity—which relates to a fundamental imbrication of art with everyday life reflected in heterogenous audiences and mixed-media artistic forms. Importantly, performativity is understood as agential capacity to instantiate new contexts and self-build material and immaterial infrastructures. Performativity is about not just saying things but doing things with art. The fourth principle—elasticity—is a flexibility in response to fast-changing conditions. This coping mechanism also involves selective refusals and strategic opacities. The fifth and final principle— convergence—is temporal; it is about fusing the past and present into thinking about city futures. The remainder of this article expands upon each of these principles in turn, and their implications.What is particularly important is that practices of independent spaces provide pathways to understand pan-African reality and forms we should embrace again somehow, according to Koyo Kouoh, who at the time headed up Raw Material Company, an independent space in Senegal.3 Speaking to a 2015 public audience in Cape Town at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, she said that independent spaces also cement theoretical, practical, and local knowledge to an international outlook; further, there is an unprecedented energy in the African contemporary art sector that is contagious. “Different canons are being established, different economies even … This is where the big shift is happening—a wealth of practitioners who are highly educated, assertive and astute. This is a strong trend in our continent.”4Importantly, all five key case studies in Platform/Plotform had been in existence in some or other form for ten or more years; their working principles thus offered strategies for resilience. They were also all encountered at time of fieldwork on the cusp of significant change and nimbly demonstrated a shapeshifting capacity in response to uncertainty. They were in effect forging self-made “panya routes,” in Kenyan lingo—understood here as alternative back routes made by people themselves in the face of challenging sociopolitical environments (see horizontality principle, below). Panya routes are unofficial routes, like border crossings, sometimes initiated by smugglers on boda bodas (motorbike taxis) that may get adopted as alternative pathways. But they also refer to an informal route and hence the often overlooked vital role of the so-called informal sector despite its primacy in many African cities. It's the back route, or the hacked route—the route in the grass that people make for themselves, which then creates a new infrastructure. The participant platforms likewise collaboratively create their own physical and conceptual infrastructures using a combination of refusals and reimaginations, and these panya routes become nodal points for larger transformations. Carlos Castellano (2018) has called such a turn in contemporary art in Uganda “the boda moment”—as more prone to project itself into the public space but also deepening the terms of the collaborations set into motion.The Platform/Plotform findings extend earlier work about artistic thinking conducted in a Johannesburg atelier at a time of prevailing uncertainty, where new collectivities and solidarity economies emerged in response.5Platform/Plotform built upon this by looking beyond South Africa's borders to learn from continental kin. Who is assembling these offspaces? What are they doing? How are they operating? Where are they located? Why are they valuable? It turned out that, despite important contextual differences, such spaces also had collective strategies of resilience that took their cues from everyday social practices and ubiquitous urban forms in their local context. Some challenges and coping strategies are common. This has implications beyond the artworld. “It's not about art,” as Simon Njami put it, speaking about his co-curatorship of Cairo's 2018 Off Biennale, an independent event.For similar contextual reasons, my arts-based research method borrows from urbanist Teresa Caldeira's method of juxtaposition of dissimilar cases from cities in the global South. Caldeira says the logic of these cities is different to that of industrial cities in the North, and also very different each to each other, and their singularities can be clearly contextualized. Specifically, juxtaposition is “to use difference and estrangement as modes of analysis and critique.” This perspective can be traced back to the practices of the European artistic avant-gardes of the early twentieth century and to the critique of anthropology in the 1980s, she adds. “It does not look for the representative, typical, similar or repetitive,” Caldeira writes. Instead, it proceeds inductively—to illuminate one another, destabilize unexamined views and generalizations, and open up new possibilities of understanding (Caldeira 2017: 5).A final introductory point, well heralded, is that Africa as a continent is dealing with accelerated rates of modern urbanization, with a dominant youth demographic and growing middle class. That contemporary context is important because many cities of the South are in accelerated flux. Asia and Africa are urbanizing at rates the West has never had to fathom, according to Aromar Revi, one of India's top urban strategists. A conflation of social, economic, and political questions thus need to be worked out at speed and scale, and he emphasized everyday lives and local solutions were the way forward. Speaking at the 2014 Kapuscinski Development Lecture in Cape Town, Revi said urbanization happens every four-to five-thousand years; in the Global South, however, this time period was being truncated to every fifty to one hundred years. What is more, after 2025, the big move from a rural to a predominantly urban existence would be sub-Saharan: “Can we build the institutional capacity, understanding, culture and technologies to use this opportunity for change and for good?”7Platform/Plotform is anchored in the African Centre for Cities, which looks to unpack such nested problems from a southern urbanism perspective. Independent art spaces are urban indicators and their working principles offer a productive institutional model for reimagining future cities beyond the status quo.Insights generated in the study toggle between independent spaces on the one hand and the urban fabric on the other. The practices of participant spaces are represented by specific art forms they facilitate as well as the artistic thinking evident in their operational and curatorial strategies, features which are mutually constitutive. For everyday urban strategies, I take a cue from Ato Quayson's search on Accra's Oxford Street for “expressive fragments” that may encapsulate a larger social totality, “flashpoints where spatial practices reveal themselves” (2014: 21). He says, “although space gives the impression of being a mere container, its dimensions are in fact produced by what it contains, while it also (re)configures and (re)arranges the contained elements” (Quayson 2014: 5). Further, the built environment and bureaucratic apparatus “instigates social relationships that are in turn progressively redefined as people interact with their built environment” (Quayson 2014: 5). From a similar spatial dialogue between the artistic and the urban, a series of five working principles (Fig. 2) were induced in Platform/Plotform. The image selections in this article echo this conceptual to and fro.The GoDown Arts Centre is located in the industrial area of Nairobi, just south of the city center.8 Its premises comprise a former car repair warehouse—the only space available at the time, said Joy Mboya, its executive director. GoDown converted the warehouse into subsidized art studios and work spaces, a gallery and performance arena. “It's a lifeline for artists,” as one visitor described the center. The operating structure is a nonprofit entity with directors, a shape that emerged when interested artists and organizations came together in 2001 to form a collective.The organizational model is horizontal, with leadership rotation among member organizations as part of its founding ethos as well as regular compound meetings and renewable leases to encourage circulation. The GoDown is structured as a trust in order to be able to think about the future and hold assets, including owning its own premises, according to Mboya. She said the organization is best understood as an experiment that is unfolding and iterative.9 This is reflected in its operating model, which is shifting from reliance upon international donor funding towards more local philanthropy and helping artists be economically independent. The latter includes copyright and creative entrepreneurship courses and hosting the East Africa Arts Summit. Horizontality is also part of its curatorial emphasis, as will become apparent.GoDown, in July 2018, was in very practical terms thinking about the future; the center was on the cusp of substantial physical change. All its studio occupants were facing imminent relocation, pending a substantial rebuild in collaboration with, among others, a Swedish architectural firm, White Arkiteker. The planned new GoDown is touted as Kenya's first major public complex for performing and visual arts to be built since independence. The vision, an ambitious multimillion-dollar multiplex, emerges from an extensive collaborative process. Five concepts inform its design: a sense of dynamism, of being animate, having a story, embodying a presence, and the notion of multiplicity.10 The future multiplex will include galleries, library, auditorium, museum, offices, restaurants, dance studios, visual art studios, an income-generating boutique art hotel, music studios, training labs, conference facilities, underground parking, and more. It will also have a porous interface with the street, symbolically representing its integrated relationship with the city.11That spatial relationship is animated annually by GoDown since 2013 through a key public art event: the Nai Ni Who festival—its name is urban slang for “who is Nairobi?” Several neighborhoods week by week curate their own events around culture and identity and accentuate what they think is important. More recently, this has focused on guided neighborhood walks led by locals. These culminated in a celebratory interneighborhood day of games. Games are a source of knowledge that is collectively authored and embodied, a multiplicity of voices that Mboya points out offers epistemic disobedience. This shared characteristic of independent spaces is echoed by ANO Institute's director, Nana Oforiatta Ayim, when she describes the multivocality of art forms in Accra as “a polyphony of different ways of telling.”12During Platform/Plotform fieldwork, I joined Nai Ni Who in a guided walk around neighborhoods including parts of Kibera, Nairobi's largest informal settlement and by some estimates the largest in Africa. We saw, among other things, the oldest Nubian homestead; an educational charity, Shofco, built around the key issue of clean water supplies; an art gallery; and a makeshift outdoor cinema. The main curatorial point I drew was horizontality. There was no official curator or head figure in an authorial hierarchy. Instead, each neighborhood took on its own programming and decided what that should comprise. As Mboya put it: “When we started, we tried to be invisible. What you do is you give a platform.”13Some key moments in that Kibera walk were standing in the art gallery—a small structure crammed full of paintings including of futuristic cities—and hearing a neighborhood guide talk about the importance of acting locally but thinking globally. That was evident in the gallery's pricing model, which used the standard global gallery commission of 60% to the artist, 40% to the gallery. But she was in fact referring to graffiti artist Zola 7, whose work I had just caught sight of. Zola 7 is best known for his “peace wanted alive” signage around Kibera, instigated after previous Kenyan postelection violence. He finds a small space and puts up his sign, the guide said, making himself visible to the world. In the very next moment, this “glocal” principle of acting locally but thinking globally was evident right outside the gallery door. A parked boda boda boasted a fake grass football field for a seat, complete with centerfield markings (Fig. 3). The timing coincided with the climax games of the World Cup soccer tournament. What is more, these selfsame bikers navigated the city and found clients by using the Taxify app on their smartphones. Even the name—boda boda-connotes something: it is a play on the word “border,” as these bikes literally crisscross boundaries. This idea of making one's own way was very prevalent in the social fabric throughout the fieldwork. The boda bodas also drive on the pavements, signalling their approach with a hoot. They move in either direction down one-ways and carry signage that mocks the vicissitudes of life: “All be lie!” They are trickster characters who make up their own rules. A sign from outside the GoDown studio of artist Dickens Otieno (Fig. 4) openly made fun of this civil disobedience: “No. 4 Use panya routes to escape the law,” it read.Panya routes—backroads that lead to surprising art and interviewees—are also a valid methodological tool. At the Nai Ni Who interneighborhood games, centered around an improvised football field in Uhuru Gardens (Fig. 5), I wandered off into the park and discovered an intriguing large-scale mosaic embedded in the ground, created by artist Eric Manya (Fig. 6). The work is the result of a collaboration, with a compelling story about a sacred stone at its middle. On a different fieldtrip, walking down an Accra street, I discovered by panya route a subversive mural by artist Nico Wayo that celebrated a radical journalist known only by a single code name, Anas. He exposes corruption and therefore masks his identity with a beaded headdress. I found the Anas mural because a kiosk14 with a portrait of Muammar Gaddafi on its door attracted me inside, where Nico Wayo was hard at work with some colleagues creating commissioned portraits. After a conversation, he led me to the mural's sidestreet location. Just walking the street offers spontaneous events that follow sets of “performative scripts,” as Quayson calls them—or irruptions that reveal certain important spatial logics (2014: 9). He gives an example of walking in zigzags down the road because of encroachment by traders on the pavement. Serendipity, he adds, is just as important as lengthy hours in the archives.The working principle of horizontality also has deeper conceptual heft. It conflates two oft-contrarian approaches to urban scholarship—the top-down emphasis of urban planning agencies and international organizations, and the bottom-up of everyday life and ordinary people—into “the relations of complicity” (Quayson 2014: 8) that actually constitute the African city.A philosophy of second chance reverberated through all the case studies through ideas of coming around again, of repair and recovery (Fig. 7). This could be giving a person a second chance, creating a kist from metal parts at the famous jua kali (hot sun) open space workshop in Nairobi, or granting clothes a second chance in for-sale piles at a roadside stall. Second chance is also reflected in disobedient design,15 such as boards marked with “remove now”—eviction signage recurring in Accra city streets, harvested and recycled into new builds. It is about different kinds of attachments between old and new, rural and urban, and how these are reflected in the way things are done in the city, and the materiality of artworks that represent that reality.The principle of second chance is a panya route; its liberatory potential gives people another shot at something or a furtive means of escape. In the words of a DJ speaking at the 2018 Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Accra: “It's about how you start something and navigate through; the music is my escape plan.” Dickens Otieno creates new sculptures in his GoDown studio from the scrap of used metal cans that he cuts up and weaves into intricate sculptural forms. “I don't know where these works will go,” he tells me during a studio visit, while also expressing the hope they would get elevated in some way further. Like Otieno, many of the artists met along the way in Platform/Plotform used an aesthetic that recuperated discarded materials and gave them a second life (Fig. 8). Contemporary art was not only reserved for an artifact newly made and presented in a white-cube context, though it might take that form. It largely took its life force from the materiality of everyday practices and amplified their logics-even when pinned to a wall. Artworks by Serge Attukwei Clottey, waiting to be installed in the ANO Institute room where I stayed, were created with Clottey's signature material of recycled bright yellow oil gallons. He calls this “afrogallonism,” a comment on consumption, trade, and necessity. “I have to reflect reality,” is how another GoDown studio artist, Tom Mboya, put it while describing his painting of a person towing a suitcase standing in front of a barred entrance.To apprehend the significance of this repair and recovery logic evident in both artistic practice and the urban fabric, it is helpful to turn again to Simon Njami. At the time of my visit to Townhouse Gallery, Njami was co-curating a series of artistic interventions at multiple sites in Cairo for the OffBiennale, titled SomethingElse. It began in response to the state closing down the official biennale in 2010. The OffBiennale manifested as a series of provocations: What if colonialism never happened? What if Columbus never discovered America? What if … The idea was to conjure parallel worlds. One installation, Geometry of the Passing by Youssef Limoud, exhibited at studio collective DARB1718, was made out of found objects collected from the streets and carefully assembled on a studio floor (Fig. 9). The artwork's form is ambiguous-perhaps a ship, or city plan, or construction site. Njami said the intention of the OffBiennale was to create “breathing room,” an evocative phrase that came to signify in Platform/Plotform the role of independent spaces and provides this article's title. Speaking about the potential impact of independent spaces in general, he elaborated: “No matter what [the state] is doing to them, no matter what the police is doing to them, they have this parenthesis, where they can breathe, where they can get a bit of strength, to keep on going.”16Njami has written about the social fabric in Africa, which helps to make some final points about this principle of second chance. In Art At Work, which accompanied a nomadic exhibition and research project in various African cities, Njami observed how the nature of the public sphere in so-called emerging societies impacts upon the artist and art production. In short, the more structured a society is, the more totalitarian its public sphere will appear, since the state is in charge both of the means of control and its implementation (Njami 2012: 28). In societies with less technocratic control, he adds, longterm societal forecasts are impossible because people dispose of a larger space. The status of the artist, meanwhile, does not hold a privileged position as it does in the West, and artistic production is necessarily receptive to the people's concerns (Njami 2012: 28). Further, there is no “centered causal logic” in Africa but rather a series of micrologics which, brought together, form the social fabric: “Markets, neighborhoods, and courtyards therefore become the places where a specific aesthetic is created.” Njami calls this an aesthetic of scraps, of bits and pieces, “a social management that is carried out and reinvented day by day” (2012: 30).In this broader sense of social management, an aesthetic of second chance (Fig. 10) emerged in Platform/Plotform. The manner in which people use instruments available in Africa is characterized by transformation and reinterpretation, Njami writes, and they reorganize structures according to their basic needs (2012: 27–28). This also means that where public participation has become something of a cliché in the West, Njami suggests it may have currency in Africa because of the spontaneity with which [every] space can become aesthetic. This insight offers a productive segue into the third working principle, which affords art an agentic capacity.ANO Institute of Art and Knowledge in Ghana's capital city of Accra is situated in a former car manufacturing warehouse. In August 2018, ANO had recently expanded into lodgings across the road. ANO is located in Osu neighborhood, on a road that leads straight to a major artery, Oxford Street. Most strikingly, positioned alongside was a Mobile Museum designed by architect Latifah Iddriss (Fig. 11). This collapsible museum represents both ANO's endeavors and the third principle of performativity.The kiosk, a small and ubiquitous multipurpose trading hut, forms the basis of the collapsible Mobile Museum design. The Mobile Museum represents a larger ANO project to travel the ten regions of Ghana and ask people what culture means to them and what they would like to see in a museum. This countrywide project questioned the community—kente sellers, weavers, farmers, artists, creators, performers, workers, traditional priests, fishermen, and healers. Their answers, captured on film, ranged from ritual to indigenous knowledge to intangible ways things are customarily done. I visited at the trip's tail-end to see the installation of a related exhibition inquiry, Future Museums. That project was just the latest in a series of ongoing ANO inquiries around the vexed notion of a museum. This began back in 2015 with the creation of a Living History Hub, also designed from a kiosk structure, to reimagine what a museum could be. It formed part of the Chale Wote Street Art Festival, an independent annual event held in nearby Jamestown. The following year, ANO extended this exploration with a Moving Museum collaboration with photographer Ofoe Amegavie. Objects used in festivals (Afahye), including Chale Wote, are used in performances and acts that engage multitudes either connected with the stories of those material goods, or witnesses to them, according to ANO's online description.17Future Museums animated a series of intersecting questions about how to best represent and synthesize the categories of content the nationwide trip was surfacing. Part of the challenge for ANO was to break away from the static white cube of the Western museum model and its imperialist impulses to better reflect contextual notions, such as the fluidity of time and the performativity of everyday life (Fig. 12)—or, dealing with what Sylvia Tamale calls second level coloniality, “the colonization of the mind, patterns of knowledge and social structures of indigenous peoples” (Tamale 2019). Tamale goes even further, saying we need to smash the pot and return to the river for fresh clay to mold a new pot. In a sense, this is already the case. People are busy living culture and defining it for themselves irrespective of what is going on elsewhere, and in these places and spaces the real work is happening, points out ANO's director Nana Oforiatta Ayim. “It comes back to what context do we stem from, what resonance [do we get] from everyday life, and to engage with that,” she told visiting Norwegian curatorial students.18 For this same reason, Oforiatta Ayim did not want to produce a formulaic exhibition opening; she sought instead something that has resonance somehow, “reimagining what we are as a nation, a collective identity … seeing what is already there visually and aesthetically and rethinking Ghana as a metaphor.”19As if on cue, while relating this curatorial challenge, an explosive din interrupted the conversation. The disruption turned out to be an installation of a different kind—a local chief was being publicly installed. He was hoisted onto the shoulders of two men, passing by on the street below ANO, and accompanied by the cheers and jubilation of a passing crowd. The performativity of the occasion seemed to encapsulate the very challenge Oforiatta Ayim was describing: how to articulate that kind of everyday experience in a reimagined museum. The Mobile Museum is running with these tensions, taking nomadic exhibitions of objects, photographs, paintings, films, and oral histories that were collected back to the places its countrywide trip traversed and figuring out how to give them curatorial form.Performance art generally employs combinations of the body, time, and space with strategies of showing. But to understand this third principle of performativity, I employ John Austin's (1962) linguistic understanding of what he called “performatives”— demonstrated by phrases such as “I promise,” “I bet,” “I bequeath.” Under the right circumstances, performatives not only describe but also, in their utterance, instantiate a new reality. In some cases and senses, Austin writes, “to say something is to do something; or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something” (1962: 12, original emphasis). His bo