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.
Event language: English with close-captions.
REGISTER HERE
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.
May 29, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
Kgotla Cosmotechnics: Negotiation Materiality and Space
with Lesego Bantsheng (she/her)
Founder of the Rural Futurisms collective
June 19, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
Lecture
with Laura Campaz (they/them)
Visual Artist & Graphic Designer
June 27, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
On Curating and Meaning-Making: Anthropological Tools and Collective Knowledge Production
with Farah Hallaba (she/her)
Social Anthropologist & Visual Ethnographer
Jul 31, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
Afropresentism: On Incantation and the Machine
with Neema Githere (they/them)
Artist & Researcher
Aug 28, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
Healing as Technology: Reclaiming Ancestral Knowledge in the Amazon
with Bárbara Santos (she/her)
Visual Artist & Independent Researcher
Sep 26, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
MIKRO BIOCINE Speculative Ecosystem Creation through Poetry, Film, Language Games, and Hacking
with Caos Ludd (they/them)
In-disciplined Artist
Oct 23, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
Critical Imagination
with Ari Melenciano (she/her)
Artist, Designer & Educator
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.
Do you like our events? To sustain Futuress in the long run, we need 600 people to support the platform with 10 CHF/month. Every little bit helps, so please consider donating today!
