Human Machine Fellowship 2024

Vita

Safiya Yon is a social practice artist and community mental health counselor. In layering narrative therapy, artistic research, ancestral remembrance, and collective care interventions, she offers space for transforming (neo-)colonial pain and fertilizing ground for Afrofuturist imagination. Yon has held community care interventions at various institutions such as Folkwang Universität der Künste, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung and Schauspielhaus Dortmund. In 2024 she curated the exhibition Rituals of Regulation at Neuer Kunstverein Wuppertal and is currently a scholar at Filmhaus Köln and Akademie der Künste der Welt’s NEW CURATORS program. 

hn. lyonga is a Black, Queer, interdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator. 

"I live and work in Berlin. I have lived in other places - and they are still present in my body, my writings, and in my life in the diaspora. I have not arrived here on my own. I have arrived on the shoulders of others. My work focuses on writing, storytelling as a vital way of neighboring, and engaging migrational inquiries pertinent to historically colonized and marginalized communities." 

hn. lyonga is currently the co-coordinator of BARAZANI.berlin - Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand, and a member of the Field Narratives Collective, working on ideas of rural biographies, transgenerational and cross-continental storytelling.

Residency

During the Human-Machine Fellowship, we will reflect on the Indigenous African technology of Lukasa memory boards, containing a capsule archive of knowledge and histories of the Luba people. We aim to expand this technology into a sacred ancestral trans-digital archive, recording traces of Black and Indigenous life and survival strategies. Orbiting through digital solar systems and cosmic time zones, the ancestral memory disk encrypted with data written in ancestral algorithmic code will become an open and ongoing knowledge portal to be passed onto future generations existing light years from today.