Bodies as Spatial Archives

Banji Chona & Samba Yonga explore the ‘Embodied Archive’ in their curation as a decolonial tool for reimagining knowledge in digital contexts, centring body, land, and memory while challenging colonial archives.

Introduction

Text: Banji Chona & Samba Yonga

This collective exploration underscores the vital role of the ‘Embodied Archive’ as a decolonial tool and space for reimagining and preserving knowledge in digital contexts. By redefining and repositioning valued ‘bodies’ as integral to the Embodied Archive, this approach challenges the Disembodied Colonial Archive and its conventional methods of history-making.

Restorative digital practices engage with land, botany, architecture, sculpture, and the human body to confront and repair the ways spatial histories have been shaped by the power imbalances of traditional historiography. The adoption of digital tools introduces reparative techniques that enrich the single-story representations of history, memory, and memorialisation found in Colonial Archives.

Embedding values of respect, autonomy, and cultural specificity into these technologies ensures that the digital representation of bodies is not merely a continuation of the colonial gaze, but a transformative practice that reclaims and recontextualizes these bodies on their own terms.

This approach transforms the digital space into a living archive, where the embodiment of memory and knowledge acts as resistance and restoration, countering the disembodied, dehumanising tendencies of traditional archives. It envisions the archive as a space for healing and reparation, where the values and identities of historically silenced voices can be fully and dynamically expressed.

Ancestral Intelligence (AI*): The Ecological and Botanical Knowledge of baTonga

Ancestral Intelligence (AI*): The Ecological and Botanical knowledge of baTonga is a digital intervention by Banji Chona that repositions the marginalised botanical and ecological knowledge systems of baTonga of Zambia and Zimbabwe. Historically, western narratives have dominated the documentation of these spaces, using tools like photography, text, and artefacts to sustain colonial and imperialist perspectives. In response, this project employs experimental digital tools and practices to create an interactive counter-archive which centres and explores baTonga knowledge systems. Artificial Intelligence redefined as „Ancestral Intelligence“ (AI*), blends factual evidence with speculative storytelling to restore erased histories and give voice to baTonga.

  • Photos: Banji Chona

The project proposes a multi-sensorial VR exhibition. Sourced from the archive of Namusampizya, a digitally alchemised ancestor from the Zambezi Basin, the collection centres the symbiotic relationship between herself as a muTonga and the natural world. Capturing the flora and fauna before their violent exploitation by colonial projects such as the Kariba Dam, she challenges the normative archival gaze of ethnographers and anthropologists of the time, whose work was riddled with complex prejudices. Offering a respectful and inclusive counter-narrative, the 1934 collection contains (AI*-generated) photographs, rendered in the absence of “real” material of baTonga in the Zambezi River Basin, Nongo (clay vessels) derived and moulded using “telluric technology” and various field recordings.

  • Photos: Banji Chona

Makishi Initiation: Digital Projection Mapping

Makishi Initiation: Digital Projection Mapping by Samba Yonga is an innovative exploration aimed at reviving the ancient Zambian practice of transmitting indigenous and ancestral knowledge through symbols, artefacts, and the human body, including tattoos (chatos). Traditionally, knowledge in these communities was encoded in symbols on wooden boards, masks, and the human body, serving as a vital medium for communication between the people, ancestral spirits—considered the keepers of knowledge—and the natural environment. By integrating digital projection mapping into this practice, the project bridges ancient and contemporary methods, offering a dynamic way to preserve and share this rich cultural heritage.

Through this digital approach, the symbolic language of the Makishi initiation rituals is not only preserved but also adapted for a modern audience, ensuring that the wisdom of these traditions remains accessible and relevant. This fusion of digital technology with ancestral practices creates a pathway for a new generation to engage with and understand the deep connections between communities, their ancestors, and the environment, fostering continuity of cultural knowledge in a rapidly changing world.

Keepers of the Forest - Keepers XR

Keepers of the Forest – Keepers XR by Emma Rukundo & Lorna Okeng is an immersive virtual reality film showcasing the Batwa people, an endangered Indigenous group and their unique role as original forest conservationists: their significant impact in protecting the endangered mountain gorillas and their natural habitat for centuries.

Photo: Emma Rukundo & Lorna Okeng

Combining 360° panoramic views, interactive elements, spatial sound, and audio narration, viewers are guided through the eyes of Mugurisi (Griot), a Mutwa, to experience the symbiotic relationship between the Batwa and nature, and how their sustainable practices can guide global climate change efforts. Africa stores 23% of the world’s carbon in forest biomass, with tropical mountain forests such as the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest – home of the Batwa – playing a central role in carbon removal.

  • Photos: Emma Rukundo & Lorna Okeng

The Batwa people are one of the oldest indigenous tribes in Africa, with a population of less than 7,000. They live high in the mountain forests, straddling Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Batwa are now also called conservation refugees as governments scramble to cope with population growth and climate change pressures. Amidst this, the Batwa return to their ancient knowledge systems to protect and balance nature.

Kamiriithu Virtual Reconstruction

The Kamiriithu Virtual Reconstruction by African Digital Heritage aims to preserve the heritage of Kamiriithu theatre by creating a 3D model of the original open-air wooden theatre structure. The Kamiriithu Theatre in Limuru, Kenya, has been celebrated as a powerful experiment in African decolonization. In 1976, local workers and community members came together to build an open-air theatre and to stage a play that quickly attracted huge audiences from across the country and beyond.

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Kamiriithu Theatre _ 3D Reconstruction Quelle: YouTube/African Digital Heritage

Written by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii and directed by Kimani Gicau, the play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) became how the actors confronted land dispossession, industrial pollution, and neocolonial injustice. Soon after its establishment, however, the Kenyan government imprisoned Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and eventually demolished the community centre.

Where does memory live when the infrastructures that uphold memory are destroyed?

Photo: African Digital Archive
Photo: African Digital Archive

This is a question African Digital Heritage (ADH) asks through its innovative approach to reconstructing destroyed and repurposed historical sites in Kenya. Using 3D reconstruction as a bridge between the tangible and intangible, ADH reconstructs lost or damaged sites, helping to preserve the architectural features and socio-spatial relationships that were integral to these places. Their methodology involves a combination of cutting-edge technology, community engagement, and deep cultural insights, ensuring that digital models accurately reflect the historical and contextual significance of the spaces they represent.

A notable example is the reconstruction of the Mau Mau detention camps, which were pivotal during the British colonial era, but largely erased from history. Through 3D reconstruction, these camps have been digitally resurrected, providing a more accessible understanding of their historical impact and facilitating deeper engagement with the narratives of those who suffered in them. Similarly, the Kamiriithu Theatre has been virtually restored, allowing for the exploration of its architectural and cultural legacy.

Video: African Digital Heritage

ADH’s integration of community knowledge and historical research in their 3D reconstructions fosters a meaningful connection to Africa’s heritage, making it accessible to a global audience, while respecting its original context. Their projects seek to demonstrate how digital reconstruction can reclaim history and reinstate cultural significance, bridging heritage, memory, and technology in innovative ways.

Closing

Drawing on the work and writing of Achille Mbembe in Earthly Community (2022), the exploration, although hosted in the digital realm and alchemized through digital tools, brings to the forefront critiques of the ways in which the digital sphere and its constitutive technologies are part of the global extractivist and colonial paradigm, both in their materiality and in their coding and data. In The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia, Achille Mbembe explores what remains of the human subject in an age when the instrumentality of reason is carried out by and through information machines and technologies of calculation. Mbembe discusses who will define the threshold or set the boundary that distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable, between that which is deemed worthy and that which is deemed worthless, and therefore dispensable. He asks whether we can turn these new instruments of calculation and power into instruments of liberation. In other words, will we be able to invent different modes of measuring that might open up the possibility of different aesthetics, different politics of inhabiting the Earth, of repairing and sharing the planet? (Unstable Media, 2022).

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