Against all odds — borders and barricades, structural inequity and underdevelopment, discriminatory policies and policing, administrative barriers and brutalities, the omnipresent scrutiny, suspicion, and surveillance — we move. We traverse the globe, slipping through the fractures of systems designed to immobilize us or, worse, mobilize us against ourselves. And yet we move anyway — strategically, spiritually, insistently.

But we do not move alone. We carry more than ourselves across thresholds and technologies codified as “agency.” We smuggle culture, subvert economies, and construct new infrastructures of relation wherever we land. Musics, fashions, hairstyles, cuisines, creoles and vernaculars, ways of making kin, moral and financial systems of credit and debt — we bring whole lifeworlds in motion. Afro culture is not a static artifact. It travels with us. It mutates, remixes, multiplies. It leaves residue and traces, not just footprints. It accumulates force as it moves.

To borrow from AbdouMaliq Simone: people are infrastructure. Few live this truth more intimately than African peoples, otherwise known as the wretched of the earth and also the people of the soil — those violently uprooted, kidnapped, exported, enslaved, and made socially dead across oceans, and those who remained, surviving in the wake of those apocalyptic disappearances. These were not merely the destruction of peoples; they were the dismantling of infrastructures — trade routes severed, governance systems broken, architectures of knowledge and relation razed to the ground. And yet, out of this wreckage, we built again. Not simply through reconstruction, but through reinvention.

We know that it is not only states and corporations that construct networks of exchange, mobility, and survival — we do. And we have a name for this practice: Ubuntu. Through improvisation and necessity, we generate an autonomous global infrastructure of commerce and culture — not housed in rigid institutions, but animated by living, moving bodies. We do not wait to be connected; we connect ourselves. Our routes are made by walking, by hustling, by holding each other up.

Yet we live in a world where infrastructure is imagined as material, mechanical, and automated — where the more mechanized a system, the more “properly infrastructural” it is believed to be. Sitting with ecologist Malcom Ferdinand, the double fracture of modernity tells us infrastructure is what allows people to live without each other — to privatize, to isolate, to extract ourselves from our own necessary being/nonbeing ecologies. But our infrastructures insist on relation. They are intimate, fugitive, tactile, and mobile. They are built in plain sight, but remain illegible to those who misrecognize our complexity as chaos. They marvel at the emergence of art, music, fashion, cuisine, and technological precocity in what they deem zones of lack. They cannot see our markets, our beauty shops, our churches, kitchens, clubs, and coded languages as anything more than noise. They do not recognize them as infrastructure at all.

And so, they pathologize. They name our movements dysfunction. They describe our networks as failure. They treat our worlds as provisional, our gatherings as threats. Having misread our Ubuntu-oriented, relational infrastructures as disorder, they attempt to dismantle them — replacing them with mechanized, extractive systems under the banners of “development” and “progress.” Meanwhile, they appropriate the cultural brilliance born from Black ‘new world’ infrastructural creativity while erasing the conditions that make such brilliance necessary and possible. They steal the song but silence the singer. They take the style but erase the story. And then they call their version the future.

But we know better. And it’s time to prove that we do.

Black: Cite; Sight–Site is a layered, participatory exploration of Afro-diasporic world-making practices. It does not seek legitimacy from dominant frames — it brings its own. It refuses the pathologization of Black relationality and instead organizes investments — financial, material, and libidinal — in its flourishing. It offers a counter-archive, a living diagram, a way through. This is not nostalgia. This is activation. This is design. We aim to help people, especially our own, recognize that informal, unauthorized assemblies of Afro-descendant peoples have long laid the foundation for alter-globalization and for an alternative planetary technosphere — one grounded not in extraction, but in Ubuntu: a fully realized inter-/intra-dependence.

We are not waiting to be included. We’re already here, already building.

Written by Muindi Fanuel Muindi and OD Enobabor, 2025