“Afropresentism: On Incantation and the Machine” with Neema Githere

This lecture explores how Afropresentism reclaims tech as a portal for Black diasporic memory & futurity, bridging AI, ancestry & liberation in the age of Big Data.

“Afropresentism is you channeling your ancestry through every technology at your disposal—meditation, conversation, love, the Web—and turning absolutely everything into a portal that takes you precisely where you need to be, in this moment, towards the next. Until finally, the space between the dream and the memory collapses into being your reality—now.” —Neema Githere

As Black diasporic people living in the age of Big Data, how do we navigate what Kodwo Eshun terms the “Age of Total Recall?” Coming together as archeologists of buried histories and architects of the future’s fossils, we meet in the Present tasked with alchemizing our displacement into liberatory transcendence. This talk explores the machine as a site of incantation, theorizing on Black diasporic engagements with new and ancient media as a blueprint for interrogating the relationship between ancestral and artificial intelligences.

Language: English with close-captions

Neema Githere (they/them) is an artist and researcher whose work explores relationality-as-art through curation, community organizing, social design, travel, and image-making. Since 2016, they have developed a research-based practice, beginning with #digitaldiaspora, a project spanning 20+ countries to examine Afro-diasporic identity on- and offline. In 2017, Githere coined the term “Afropresentism,” a concept on diasporic embodiment in the age of Big Data that has shaped conferences and exhibitions globally. A 2023-2024 Practitioner Fellow at Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab, they are developing Data Healing, a digital rehabilitation project rooted in indigenous value systems.

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.