The 20th century can be read as a formative ecotonal space—an unsettled, generative borderland where networks fractured and reformed, collaborations ignited, and tensions gave way to new modes of relation. Within this compressed terrain, distinct ecologies of African and Afro-diasporic thought and practice took shape, producing postcolonial libraries and archives that carried with them emergent aesthetic and epistemic registers—unfinished, insurgent, and alive with possibility.  

In June 2025, Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, in partnership with the Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.), launched The Short Century Intensive, a fellowship designed to support artistic and scholarly inquiry into the cultural and political histories of the mid-to-late 20th century.  As part of the second chapter of Re:assemblages, a dynamic, multi-year programme designed to foster collaboration and experimentation across postcolonial art archives and library collections, the intensive is anchored by Okwui Enwezor’s seminal 2001-2002 exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994, which examined the intersections of art and politics during a period of intense struggle and transformation across Africa. Taking this archive as a provocation, the intensive asks: what forms of relation, refusal, and repair remain possible in the afterlives of this compressed century?

The 20th century can be read as a formative ecotonal space—an unsettled, generative borderland where networks fractured and reformed, collaborations ignited, and tensions gave way to new modes of relation. Within this compressed terrain, distinct ecologies of African and Afro-diasporic thought and practice took shape, producing postcolonial libraries and archives that carried with them emergent aesthetic and epistemic registers—unfinished, insurgent, and alive with possibility.  

In June 2025, Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, in partnership with the Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.) announced the 2025–26 edition of Re:assemblages, a dynamic, multi-year programme designed to foster collaboration and experimentation across postcolonial art archives and library collections. This ambitious initiative reimagines the stewardship and activation of African and Afro-diasporic art archives, and will result in a rich constellation of international convenings, symposia, micro-publications, and a research intensive.