Safiya Yon is a social practice artist and mental health counselor. In her work, she combines narrative therapy and collective care to transform (neo-)colonial trauma. hn. lyonga Black, queer artist and writer, explores storytelling as a means of communication and migration. His practice focuses on intergenerational narratives and the history of marginalized communities.
Together, they are working with the indigenous African technology of the Lukasa memory tablets, which contain an archive of the knowledge and history of the Luba people. Inspired by this, they are developing a digital, sacred archive that preserves Black and indigenous memory spaces for future generations.
Her project is part of the Man-Machine program of the Junge Akademie Berlin in cooperation with the E-Werk Luckenwalde and the E.ON Foundation. The scholarship promotes artistic explorations of digital technologies and artificial intelligence – especially from perspectives that critically question Western narratives of progress and binary classification systems such as “natural” and “artificial” and enable new patterns of thought, narratives and approaches to the world.
