Safiya Yon is a social practice artist and mental health counselor. Her work combines narrative therapy and collective care to transform (neo-)colonial pain and trauma. hn. lyonga, a Black, queer artist and writer, explores storytelling as a means of communication and migration. His practice focuses on intergenerational narratives and the histories of marginalized communities.
Together, they engage with the indigenous African technology of Lukasa memory boards—a tactile archive of the knowledge and history of the Luba people. Drawing from this tradition, they will create a sacred digital archive to preserve the history of Black and Indigenous peoples for future generations.
Their project is part of the Human Machine Fellowship program of the Junge Akademie Berlin in cooperation with E-Werk Luckenwalde and the E.ON Foundation. The program supports international artists across disciplines who deal with digital technologies and artificial intelligence—particularly from perspectives that critically examine Western narratives of progress and binary constructs such as “natural” and “artificial.” The aim is to enable new modes of thinking, storytelling, and worldmaking in response to the urgencies of our time.
