Welcome to the Next Chapter of Curatorplug
If you are reading this…welcome! You have walked into something that took a long time to build, and that is only just beginning. This is our home on the internet, a place to read, listen, look and linger. We built it slowly and with care, and we are glad you are here.
Where this began
Curatorplug began with music. It started with one curator sharing playlists online, sensing that the sounds coming out of Africa and its diaspora deserved more than a passing mention on someone else’s feed. People listened, and conversations followed. Before long the playlists were not enough. The music led to the artists, the artists led to their worlds, and those worlds opened onto film, fashion, arts, design, literature, ritual and language.
What started as a way of sharing songs became a way of seeing an entire culture on its own terms. Along the way we learned that curation is a form of care. To choose, to frame and to credit is to say that something matters. Slowly the playlist became a publication, the publication became a platform, and the platform is still growing into an institution. This website is the next step on that road, and it is the first place where all of it can live together.
What we hope this becomes
Our hope is large, so we will say it plainly.
We want Curatorplug to be a living archive. African creativity should be documented while it is happening, not decades later by someone else. We want to name the movements, name who funded them, credit the people who made them, and keep asking why so many remain overlooked. We want to do this with rigour and curiosity, and without apologising for our point of view.
We hope to be a platform that stewards artists rather than simply featuring them. A feature lasts a week, but a career lasts a lifetime. We want to build ways for readers, collaborators and patrons to stand behind creators over the long term, so that attention turns into support and recognition turns into livelihood.
We hope to become cultural infrastructure: a network of editors, writers, curators and makers across the continent and the diaspora, each bringing their own city, language and lineage. Our aim is a conversation that moves between Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi, Dakar, London and beyond without needing permission from anywhere else.
Above all, we hope to be world-making. We do not want to explain Africa to anyone. We want to build a space where African and diasporic imagination is the centre, the reference point and the default. We want a young artist to find their lineage here, and a reader far from home to find a sense of belonging. We want a place where heritage and the avant-garde sit side by side without one being asked to justify itself to the other.
An invitation
Imologang Molly Morulane
Editor-in-Chief
Curatorplug
Curatorplug is a cultural organisation and creative platform tracking and exploring the ideas, people, and creative practices shaping African and diasporic culture globally. Part publication, part cultural platform, part ongoing world-building research, we take experimental approaches to media, cultural organising, publishing, curation, and platform-making — creating new infrastructure for how stories, ideas, and communities connect and endure.
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