This chapter provides a broad overview of the richness and diversity of rock art in western Arnhem Land. Emphasising the cultural connectivity between rock art, history, culture, Ancestral Beings, language, and land, we introduce the cultural context for rock art creation as well as the paradox whereby an apparently conservative artistic tradition might also shed light on historical particularity and change.

Until recently, academics deemed that the pasts of Australian Indigenous people did not really count as history. But First Nations people have quite obviously left records of their experiences and have long insisted that they have history. For example, Aboriginal people have variously referred to rock art as ‘archives’. In order to comprehend Indigenous archives, this chapter makes the case for broader approaches to knowledges and conceptions of the past.

This chapter reveals how rock art sheds important light on individual lives as well as speaking more broadly to Indigenous experiences. We argue that rock art is created in social, historical contexts – and these contexts are evidenced in the art. Rock art is a fully situated historical source. Focusing on the story of artist Quilp, we demonstrate how rock art is a ‘counter-archive’ that can reveal important new understandings about Aboriginal experience, about which the colonial archive is silent.

This chapter reveals how Aboriginal people adopted and integrated alphabetic script into their art, recognising the potential of this kind of knowledge transmission and blurring the categories imposed on their pasts. Focusing on the biography of artist Narlim, we reveal how he integrated alphabetic script into his art at times, experimenting with different forms of communication.

This chapter turns to intergenerational historical memory and the function of rock art as both archive and mnemonic as the art’s own communicative power. Through the biography of Josie Maralngurra, we reveal the art’s function in passing historical knowledge to the next generation at its production, content, through evoking memory and its speaking to future generations. Rock art is a means of transferring knowledge in the present to future generations; a living practice as well as ancient record.

We conclude that this First Nations archive is a repository of a different kind, for a different kind of history, grounded in a different kind of time, beyond the limited pasts which most academic historians and archaeologists are used to knowing. Scholars must therefore rely on deep partnerships and reciprocity with First Nations communities to approach these knowledges.

The films in this chapter address themes of futurities, digital technologies of the moving image, socio-cultural movements and cultural restitution. In an interview with the journalist Oulimata Gueye, the Kenyan writer and film director Wanuri Kahiu debates science fiction and whether the layered contemporary meanings and interpretations of Afrofuturism are a trend. Kahiu said she considers science fiction to be a longstanding feature of the African oral tradition, stating there have always been

Wanuri Kahiu, Pumzi, Kenya, 2009, 20 Minutes

In the short film Pumzi (meaning breath in Swahili), the Nairobi-based director imagines a future dystopian world and inadvertently ventures via science fiction into the lively genre of Afrofuturism. In the scenario, survivors of a World War Three, the ‘Water War’, live in a hermetic underground soci-ety. This future is a totalitarian, technocratic culture governed by military personnel. The protagonist, Asha (Kudzani Moswela), like all citizens, must wear tubes to recycle her bodily fluids in a context of extreme water scarcity and chooses to break free to the contaminated surface.

Asha, a scientifically trained conservator, works alone in an almost empty laboratory of a sanitized natural history museum. She is a member of a hierarchical and fully technocratic society, lodged far underground after a water war contaminated the surface. Water is so scarce in this quiet chthonian environment that she and her co-inhabitants use grafted-on tubing to recycle their bodily fluids through frequent exercise. When Asha receives an anonymous, unauthorized parcel containing a jar of soil with high humidity content and no radioactivity, she contacts her superior who appears remotely on a screen without uttering words. Communication is transmitted and monitored by an unknown process. Her superior does not believe Asha. She orders her to throw the sample away and to take her dream suppressant medication. Asha breaks the rules and plants a seed in the soil, waters it and observes it grow.

Most architects, urbanists, landscape architects and designers broadcast and disseminate their work by means of public speaking tours. In recent years, this practice has been augmented by recorded versions that can be streamed anytime and often are embedded into their company websites. Rwandan architect Christian Benimana, who leads the Africa Studio in the Boston-based architectural practice Mass Design, gave a talk to a large audience in Arusha, Tanzania, on August 2017, as part of the popular Ted Talk series.

In his talk, entitled ‘The Next Generation of Architects and Designers’, Benimana speaks of the African continent's urgent near-future needs to match the population growth, which he estimated would require 700,000,000 sustainable housing units, more than 300,000 schools and 85,000 medical clinics to be built by 2050. He translated those numbers into seven medical clinics, 25 schools and about 60,000 housing units per day. Benimana is optimistic that this massive task can be achieved sustainably by African architects who understand the landscape and the population's needs. He illustrates his talk with examples of his own work, such as a new prototype project, the Kasungu Maternity Village, attached to the Kasungu District Hospital in Malawi. Completed in 2015, it provides shelter and antenatal care for expectant mothers from their thirty-sixth week, which helps reduce maternity casualties.

He also presented the work of other architects in the Ted Talk, which includes a prototype project by the Nigerian architect Kunlé Adeyemi, whose Amsterdam- and Lagos-based design and development practice NLÉ proposed the Makoko Floating School project of A-frame triangular structures on barges to serve as schools and community centres for Makoko's floating informal settlement in Lagos, and Diébédo Francis Kéré in Burkina Faso, who designed the Lycée Schorge secondary school (completed 2018) in Kougoudou, a region with a population of about 200,000. The school was built from locally sourced materials using local construction processes and involves and serves the local community.

In a 20-minute interview, Djibril Diop Mambéty (1945–1998) was asked how to make a movie, to which he responded with a monologue:

In this micro-performance, the film director Mambéty, who filmed the locations where he lived, places that he knew and frequented in Dakar, reveals an inner landscape of cinematic creation from the beginning, familiar and yet ex novo. This study of documentary and dramatic African film is viewed through cinematic portals and is intended to interpret the post-colonial environment and to anticipate the future; a range of examples of African film and video – documentary and fiction – present, evaluate and critique the transformation of urban and rural landscapes in Africa. Operating from differing points of view and at varying levels of investigation, these chapters demonstrate the development and professionalization of African cinema over the years, and also discuss the role cinema plays in highlighting these landscapes by juxta-posing the empirical data that the moving image provides, and in relation to the various domains within, that may not be similar but may adjoin and interconnect. The visual and aural nature of cinema and its photographic and documentary character also allow for the discussion and critique of contemporary issues in the urban and rural dynamic of development, from related subjects on climate change, such as deforestation, sustainability and biodiversity, water and food supply, inequity and women's rights, political instability, security and sovereignty.

These selected works comprise multiplatform digital video, cinema and streamed moving images, which, with an emphasis on documentaries, open the door to rethinking and eventually to the possibilities of fresh proposals responding to the situations portrayed. Cinematic media convey important visual information regarding the urban and rural built environments in Africa's numerous geographic zones and diverse territories that are projected for major evolution and development over the coming decades.