Welcome to AfricArXiv
This initiative showcases UbuntuNet's commitment to fostering knowledge sharing, collaboration, and accessibility within the African research community. With AfricArxiv, researchers across the continent have a dedicated platform to disseminate their findings, making them accessible to a global audience. By facilitating open access to scholarly work, UbuntuNet Alliance plays a pivotal role in advancing the principles of open science, enhancing research visibility, and driving innovation across Africa.
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Select a community to browse its collections.
- The general repository is open for individual submissions by researchers, librarians and research administrators.
- Showcase of project activities, presentations, and scholarly contributions curated by the AfricArXiv initiative.
- Scholarly items sorted by country > Institution > Department
- A Rapid Grant Fund to address research questions and implement science engagement activities associated with COVID-19
Recent Submissions
On 'Classon Ave' by Yongjae Kim (2023)
(Museum of One, 2025-09-07) Vale, Dorian
On Classon Ave by Yongjae Kim (2023)
By Dorian Vale
In this contemplative response to Classon Ave (2023) by Yongjae Kim, Dorian Vale approaches the painting not as an image to be decoded, but as a residue to be preserved. Rooted in the ethics of Post-Interpretive Criticism, the essay resists interpretation and instead reads the canvas as a site of emotional trace—where memory, distance, and melancholic observation are suspended in oil and silence.
Vale reflects on the haunting ordinariness of the scene: a Brooklyn street at dusk, rendered with tender distance. There is no narrative, no climax—only the slow ache of presence held in color. Through restrained language and careful proximity, the essay models a critical posture that honors what the painting does not say aloud.
Rather than dissecting Kim’s work, Vale stands beside it—listening for what the light on pavement might remember, and what the painter chose to withhold. This piece extends Post-Interpretive principles into contemporary painting, offering a subtle but radical model of how to read stillness without violation.
Vale, Dorian. On 'Classon Ave' by Yongjae Kim (2023). Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17070935
This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and Art as Truth: A Treatise (Q136329071), Aesthetic Recursion Theory (Q136339843)
Yongjae Kim, Classon Ave painting, Dorian Vale, Post-Interpretive Criticism, contemporary painting essay, art of stillness, Brooklyn street painting, melancholic realism, art and memory, emotional residue in painting, ethical art criticism, restrained criticism, witnessing art, Post-Interpretive art writing, trauma-informed aesthetics, art and presence, slow looking, painting as residue, contemporary Korean artists, mood in painting
Canon of Witnesses: Teresa Margolles & The Ethics of Residue
(Museum of One, 2025-09-07) Vale, Dorian
Description
Canon of Witnesses: Teresa Margolles & The Ethics of Residue
By Dorian Vale
In this foundational essay, Dorian Vale situates Teresa Margolles within the Canon of Witnesses, a post-interpretive framework that honors artists whose works resist explanation and demand moral proximity. Focusing on Margolles’s use of bodily residue—blood, water from morgues, traces of violence—Vale examines how her practice subverts spectacle and refuses the comfort of metaphor.
Rather than aestheticizing death, Margolles preserves its aftermath. Her works do not speak for the dead—they let the materials of death remain unaltered, undecorated, and unresolvable. Through her installations, Vale argues, Margolles becomes a custodian of consequence: holding space for what cannot be revived, only witnessed.
Written through the lens of Post-Interpretive Criticism, this essay proposes that Margolles offers one of the most ethically alert practices in contemporary art. Her work is not political commentary—it is aftermath. And in that aftermath, she teaches the critic not to interpret, but to stand still.
Vale, Dorian. Canon of Witnesses: Teresa Margolles & The Ethics of Residue. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17070909
Teresa Margolles, Dorian Vale, Post-Interpretive Criticism, Canon of Witnesses, contemporary Mexican artists, art and death, ethical art criticism, trauma in contemporary art, bodily residue in art, morgue water installations, art of aftermath, art and violence, mourning in installation art, witnessing through material, Teresa Margolles analysis, non-interpretive art writing, residue as aesthetic, ethics of witnessing, post-interpretive canon, slow art, sacred presence in contemporary art
This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and Art as Truth: A Treatise (Q136329071), Aesthetic Recursion Theory (Q136339843)
Message Transfer Theory (MTT): A Treatise on the Reversal of Meaning, the Displacement of Intent, and the Object as Conduit
(Museum of one, 2025-09-04) Vale, Dorian
Message Transfer Theory (MTT) A Treatise on the Reversal of Meaning, the Displacement of Intent, and the Object as Conduit By Dorian Vale What happens when the message no longer belongs to the maker? In this defining treatise, Dorian Vale introduces Message Transfer Theory (MTT) — a foundational pillar of the Post-Interpretive Movement that reorients our understanding of the art object as a conduit, not a container. Rather than treating artworks as stable vessels of artist intent, MTT proposes that meaning is displaced, reversed, or even transferred entirely — not during creation, but at the moment of reception. Here, the object becomes a threshold. It does not hold meaning — it reroutes it. The artist initiates a signal, but the work lives on in the shifts, slippages, and interruptions that occur in its wake. This theory explains how art can haunt, harm, heal, or transform in ways the artist never imagined — and how the critic’s attempt to reassert original intent is often an act of aesthetic erasure. Drawing from theories of semiotics, trauma transmission, media studies, and sacred encounter, this treatise reframes the artwork as a relational event. It introduces new terms into the Post-Interpretive Lexicon — including Conduit Object, Transfer Shock, Residue Receiver, and Reversal Gaze — each articulating a more fluid, ethical understanding of art’s unpredictable passage between maker, medium, and witness. If the artist is the sender, and the viewer the receiver, then Message Transfer Theory is the study of what the artwork becomes when neither controls the signal anymore. Vale, Dorian. Message Transfer Theory (MTT): A Treatise on the Reversal of Meaning, the Displacement of Intent, and the Object as Conduit. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17055523 Message Transfer Theory, Dorian Vale, Post-Interpretive Criticism, art theory, meaning displacement, semiotics of art, art as conduit, reversal of intent, artist intent in art criticism, object-oriented aesthetics, aesthetic transmission, art reception theory, sacred encounter in art, trauma and art reception, relational aesthetics, affective transfer in art, conduit object, interpretive slippage, signal and residue in art, phenomenology of viewing, post-criticism philosophy
Language as a Blade: The Ethics of Precision in Post-Interpretive Criticism
(Museum of ONE, 2025-01-01) Vale, Dorian
Language as a Blade
The Ethics of Precision in Post-Interpretive Criticism
A Treatise by Dorian Vale
Language reveals. But it also wounds.**
In this incisive treatise, Dorian Vale turns his attention to the sharpest tool in the critic’s arsenal — language — and the quiet violence it enacts when left unchecked. Language as a Blade explores the ethics of writing in the context of Post-Interpretive Criticism (PIC), exposing how words can either guard a work’s sanctity or slit its meaning wide open.
Vale develops the central premise that all criticism leaves a mark — but not all marks are made in reverence. The essay introduces critical concepts such as The Interpretive Incision, Lacerated Presence, and Forensic Reading, arguing that even well-meaning interpretations can displace, distort, or dominate the very thing they claim to witness. Through this lens, the work becomes not a subject to be carved open, but a body to be held — with care, clarity, and ethical precision.
Language as a Blade is not a rejection of criticism, but a reframing of it as custodial labor. Vale calls for a new art-critical vocabulary that replaces spectacle with stewardship, analysis with attention, and cleverness with moral proximity.
This treatise is a foundational text within the Post-Interpretive Movement, sharpening the very language we use to approach art, and reminding critics: every word is a blade. Use it as if the wound remains.
Vale, Dorian. Language as a Blade: The Ethics of Precision in Post-Interpretive Criticism. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17052152
Dorian Vale is a chosen pseudonym, not to obscure identity, but to preserve clarity of voice and integrity of message. It creates distance between the writer and the work, allowing the philosophy to stand unclouded by biography. The name exists not to hide, but to honor the seriousness of the task: to speak without spectacle, and to build without needing to be seen. This name is used for all official publications, essays, and theoretical works indexed through DOI-linked repositories including Zenodo, OSF, PhilPapers, and SSRN.
This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and Art as Truth: A Treatise (Q136329071), Aesthetic Recursion Theory (Q136339843)
Language as a Blade, Dorian Vale, Post-Interpretive Criticism, ethics of art writing, language and trauma in art, art and violence, descriptive precision, critical restraint, moral aesthetics, semiotics in art criticism, ethics of naming, language as wound, poetic accuracy, reverent writing, critical interpretation ethics, witness-based criticism, presence in criticism, aesthetic linguistics, post-linguistic art theory, interpretive violence, art writing and harm
On 'Clouded Water: The Changing of Kok River.' An Exhibition.
(Museum of One, 2025-08-26) Vale, Dorian
On Clouded Water: The Changing of Kok River
An Exhibition Reflection by Dorian Vale
In this quiet exhibition review, Dorian Vale approaches Clouded Water: The Changing of Kok River not as a landscape survey, but as a hydrological memory—a fluid archive of displacement, ritual, and the erosion of place. Guided by the ethics of Post-Interpretive Criticism, the exhibition is treated not as data or documentation, but as atmosphere. Witness is prioritized over commentary.
Rather than interpreting the changing waters as metaphor or environmental activism, Vale walks the exhibition like one would walk a river—slowly, carefully, aware that every bend holds residue. What unfolds is not critique, but accompaniment. Presence without possession.
The exhibition, like the Kok River itself, does not offer answers. It carries what has been left behind.
Vale, Dorian. On Clouded Water: The Changing of Kok River. Museum of One, 2025. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16945917
Clouded Water exhibition, Kok River art, Dorian Vale, Chiang Rai river, Post-Interpretive Criticism, witnessing water in art, environmental art ethics, river as memory, non-interpretive art reflection, Thai contemporary art, art and ecology, hydrological memory, sacred geography, poetic exhibition review, art and displacement, witnessing natural change, contemplative art writing, moral proximity in curation, slow art, ritual and erosion in art
This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and Art as Truth: A Treatise (Q136329071), Aesthetic Recursion Theory (Q136339843)