As a philosopher and novelist of transatlantic dialogues among various Black worlds (US, Caribbean, Europe...), Nadia Yala Kisukidi helps us to understand diasporic artistic experiences. Africa influences the world now more than ever, moving past boundaries toward a new cosmopolitanism, or a “Laëtitia africana”: the fresh momentum and vital post-diasporic desire to return to the African continent–reversing South-North relations into North-South relations.

Artist Éric Van Hove was born in Algeria, raised in Cameroon, and studied in Belgium and Japan before moving to Morocco in 2012. His work stretches beyond the accepted definitions of contemporary art, activism, economics, and mechanics. By creating collective, post-capitalist production systems, he revalorises the know-how of local workers and craftsmen, in a general resistance to the ideology of industrial progress.  In 2011, Éric Van Hove took up a challenge posed by the composition of the Fulgura, a luxury car produced entirely in Morocco by engineer Abdeslam Laraki, but with a German-made engine. The artist then set about creating a 100% Moroccan hand-crafted engine, which became a work entitled V12 Laraki. Since then, Éric Van Hove has expanded his Marrakech-based production network with the creation of Fenduq, a workshop employing around fifty people working with technology, without boundary between artist and craftsperson. It is in this workshop that the Mahjouba model, a replica of the Chinese moped, will be created, a product born of Taylorist principles reworked by the intelligence of the Moroccan hand. In other words, an invitation to imagine all the routes and continents catalysed by this motorbike, which is a constructivist assembly of unique influences and techniques; of customised parts. As a means of locomotion and a mythical object of modernity and the quest for freedom, Éric Van Hove's motorbike symbolises the emerging convergence of Africa's influence on the world - and the desire to return to Africa.