“Kgotla Cosmotechnics: Negotiation Materiality and Space” with Lesego Bantsheng

This lecture explores how rural technologies, rooted in care and reciprocity, challenge dominant narratives of technological progress.

Through participatory workshops and storytelling practices, Rural Futurisms engages with local traditional knowledge systems and material traditions to inspire equitable and regenerative futures. Rejecting extractive paradigms, this work centers on community-driven innovations that prioritize care, ecological systems, and cultural heritage. By integrating traditional practices with contemporary techniques, Rural Futurisms presents alternative visions of how technology can address climate and social challenges, drawing on concepts such as Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics to reimagine technics that respond to social contexts. 

This talk invites audiences to reimagine rural spaces not as peripheral, but as vital grounds for experimentation and transformation, where local knowledge and planetary care converge.

Language: English with close-captions

Lesego Bantsheng (she/her) is a researcher, urban designer, and landscape architect focused on rural-urban spatial dynamics in southern Africa. Founder of Rural Futurisms NPC, she examines rural materiality within cosmologies, fostering collaboration in rural and urban world-building. A contributor to Matri-Archi(tecture), she explores rural design lexicons and their influence on urban morphologies and mobilities. Her work emphasizes materiality and morphology as tools for world-making amid the climate crisis and social injustice. Lesego holds Master’s degrees in Urban Design (The Bartlett School of Architecture) and Landscape Architecture (University of Cape Town), using her practice to reimagine human and non-human collaborations beyond the Anthropocene.

Lesego portrait credits: Sophia Gunkel

This lecture is part of the Unwired Currents—Imagining Technology Otherwise free online lecture series challenging dominant narratives of design, knowledge-making, and technological progress.

The lecture series has been curated by Valentina Alcalde Gómez and Adriana Palencia from the Latin American platform Matería Oscura, alongside Maya Ober from Futuress. It is part of the Unwired Currents—Imagining Technology Otherwise larger collaborative project between the think & do tank Dezentrum and Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and Matería Oscura.

The program is possible thanks to a generous grant from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.