appropriations - outcomes

Greenman Muleh Mbillo - Reconstructive Prophesy, 2021

digital video, 5'

Two centuries have passed since the Prophetess Syokimau saw the iron snake - the British train - slithering across the Kenyan land, spitting forth colonial characters and artifacts, and creating a new sense of the normal life. The peoples of the land have been alienated from their ancestral identities by globalized technologies and are facing internal conflict. This can only be resolved by reconstructing a new reality from colonial icons and re-connecting with ancient spirituality.

Joan Otieno - Medusa's Coil Concept, 2021

digital video, 7'

Long ago, when society was organized through ethnic communities, folk tales and riddles depicted the snake as an intelligent, smart and cunning creature. When Islam and Christianity arrived, it brought along additional stories about this animal, which were much more ambiguous. In contemporary East-Africa, ethnicity is becoming less important and technology appears to be a new religion. Can the coiling of the snake still help us? Or should we look for new symbolic acts in the transformation of devices and materials?

Dani Ploeger - The Cults, 2021

16mm film, 6'

An analytical text and ethnographic film from the colonial past are teleported to a future techno-culture in which mythic lifeworlds are created with repurposed technologies. Meanwhile, sorry creatures continue to scrounge on dumps to harvest resources and worship standardized consumer devices.

Dani Ploeger - Powerless Space, 2017

Installation/video: HDPE beverage crate, HDPE power socket blanking plates

Part of a broken Coca-Cola crate was processed in the plastic grinding machine at Taka ni Pato recycling factory in Kibera slum, Nairobi. The High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) chips were subsequently moulded into a set of power socket blanking plates on a kerosine stove. The power sockets in the exhibition area have been removed and replaced by the blanking plates; an electricity-less space has been created, inhospitable to digital and electric technologies.