“The Western archive is exhausted”, says Senegalese thinker Felwine Sarr. New perspectives are needed to break down colonial thought patterns and Eurocentric views that are deeply rooted in the European understanding of culture and knowledge and continue to shape the relationship between the global North and the global South.
The interdisciplinary workshop and artist-in-residency project PLURAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE DIGITAL aims to make the topics of digital archives, technology, digital art and storytelling productive for the context of decolonial knowledge production. The project thus pursues the question: What opportunities and challenges does the digital offer in order to present plural knowledge and counteract Eurocentric knowledge systems? The workshops will take place in Nairobi and Frankfurt, while the artist residency is open to Kenyan artists who primarily use digital technologies. The selected artists will develop their work in close collaboration with African Digital Heritage. The Nairobi-based non-profit organisation works at the intersection of culture and technology to advance a more critical, holistic and knowledge-based approach to digital solutions to African cultural heritage issues.
The workshops in Nairobi and Frankfurt open up a space for discourse on the question of plural knowledge in the digital realm. The following questions, among others, will be discussed: How do digital technologies support the dissemination of local cultural knowledge? Which target groups are identified and how can they be reached? What challenges do technology, archive ethics and databases face when it comes to the non-hegemonic presentation of plural knowledge?
The project takes place within the framework of the TALKING OBJECTS LAB, an interdisciplinary artistic research project that has been running since 2020 and critically scrutinises practices of knowledge production. The LAB is led by a Kenyan-Senegalese-German curatorial team and unfolds in various events on the African continent and in Europe. The LAB accompanies the development of the TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE, a digital archive for polyperspectival and decolonial knowledge production, which will go online at the end of 2024.
