This year’s Nomadic African Studio, The New Non-Aligned, revisits the radical imagination of the 1950s Non-Aligned Movement while confronting today’s fractured geopolitical order. As global power blocs harden and old alliances unravel, the Studio asks what non-alignment can mean in an era shaped by digital empires, climate crisis, extractive economies, and renewed struggles for sovereignty. From an African vantage point, the New Non-Aligned is not a refusal to engage the world, but a strategic re-positioning—one that insists on autonomy, multiplicity, and future-making beyond inherited binaries.

The Studio takes place in Accra, a city that played an active role in shaping ideas of post-colonial sovereignty, Pan-Africanism and international solidarity. Accra provides a critical context in which to examine how everyday systems—housing, labour, energy, infrastructure and ecology—become sites of architectural and political imagination. Rather than utopian or dystopian futures, The New Non-Aligned is concerned with forms of speculative survival: how culture, space and collective intelligence make life liveable under conditions of uncertainty and uneven development.

The 2026 Nomadic African Studio will take place in Accra, Ghana, from 20 July – 14 August 2026.

Participation is through an Open Call, opening 09h00 GMT on 25 February 2026. Follow us on Instagram to receive updates on this year’s Nomadic African Studio!