Imaginative Futuring for Social Change

In this episode, Hannah talks to members of the Kairos Futura collective from Nairobi, Ajax Axe, Abdul Rop and Willie Ng'ang'a. Their project, The Wild Future Lab, won this year's S+T+ARTS Prize Africa, an initiative of the European Commission, recognising pioneering projects in Africa that catalyse social change by blending science, technology, and art. The Wild Future Lab not only creates a blueprint for the future but tries to build that future with resources available in the present.

Art Is Not a Thing is produced by Ars Electronica and developed in collaboration with Radio Ö1.

Host: Hannah Balber
Producers: Ana-Maria Carabelea, Christopher Sonnleitner, Marlene Grinner
Editing: Hannah Balber, Ana-Maria Carabelea
Music: Karl Julian Schmidinger

Ars Electronica:
https://ars.electronica.art/
https://www.instagram.com/arselectronica/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/arselectronica

Kairos Futura
https://www.thefutureisonearth.org/

Transcript

Ajax Philips: I’d say we’re an arts futurist organisation, and we might be one of the only arts futurist organisations in the world. We're centred around imaginative futuring. And imaginative futuring is when you think about what you want for the future, instead of just letting the future happen to you. 

Ana-Maria Carabelea: Welcome to Art Is Not a Thing, the podcast series about art as a practice of critical inquiry, knowledge production and world-building. My name is Ana Carabelea, and together with my colleague Hannah Balber, we discuss with artists and researchers whose work questions and reimagines our practices in and of the world. What would a city look like where jackets charge cell phones, where textiles are woven from banana fibres, and where technology is developed locally rather than imported? In this episode, we discuss this topic with three members of the “Kairos Futura” collective from Nairobi: Ajax Axe from the US and Abdul Rop and Willie Ng'ang'a from Kenya. Their project, “The Wild Future Lab,” deals with clothing, textiles, and their production—and how new ideas can be used to respond to ecological and social challenges. The artistic research lab brings together artists, designers, and scientists to explore what a sustainable and self-determined future for Kenya could look like, using the materials and opportunities that are already available locally today. “The Wild Future Lab” has won this year's S+T+ARTS Prize Africa, an initiative of the European Commission, recognizing pioneering projects in Africa that catalyze social change by blending science, technology, and art.  

Hannah Balber: Together, you've been imagining and building a radically different future for Nairobi through something you call The Wild Future Lab. Before we talk in detail about this project, your inspirations, your research, and the ideas behind it, I'd love to get to know you a little bit better. So, could each of you introduce yourselves? Who are you and what do you do?  

Ajax: I'm Ajax Philips, and I am an artist. I'm a sculptor and installation artist. And I also have a background in journalism. I first visited Kenya in 2010 when I was working as a journalist. I had this ongoing kind of side practice in art that became my full-time practice in 2016, after I had a fairly successful solo show. So I was sort of going back and forth between doing journalism work, working across Africa and doing sculptural exhibitions. But I wanted to be able to do more community-based work around art for social change. And that's how we started to work on Kairos Futura projects. 

Abdul: My name is Abdul Rop. I'm an artist from Nairobi, Kenya. I do printmaking and sculpting, and also recently more designing. And also, I'm a founding member of Kairos Futura.  

Willie: Hello, I’m Willie Ng’ang’a. I'm a scientist from Kenya, and my background is in biomedical science. And then I got into climate research. And that's how I linked up with Abdul and Ajax, and Kairos Futura, because their act is related to social change and a lot of focus on ecological issues. So, we found each other. And then, currently, I'm exploring the intersection between science and art for social change. And so that's championing as a team approach. So that’s who I am. 

Hannah: You are part of the core team of Kairos Futura. How did you come together as a team, and what brought you to create this collective? 

Abdul: We didn't start out wanting to become an art collective. It started out as a project which we did together in Lamu. Me, Ajax, and one of our members who's not here today, Lincoln, and it was called Lamu Space Station. That's how we started our journey. And some years down the line, now we've become a very big collective. 

Hannah: But how did you meet? 

Ajax: It was deep COVID 2021. And there were a lot of people hiding out outside of Nairobi because Nairobi had really strict lockdowns. And there were a number of artists who were all on this island in northern Kenya. It's about 60 miles from the Somali border, called Lamu. And I actually met Abdul because I was looking for a printing press that I knew had been abandoned in an old house in the main town there. And we were yelling and banging on the doors, trying to find someone to let us in. And it turns out we were actually yelling and banging on the wrong door of the wrong house. But Abdul came to the door, and he had fixed the printing press that had been out of use for many years. And then we were, you know, exploring ideas. And we wanted to do something more around community building and immersive storytelling. And Lamu is an island that has no cars. It was built in the 14th century, the main city. So it has the feeling of a medieval city like you see in Italy or, you know, some parts of Greece, where the roads are super narrow. Everything's moved by donkeys or by boat. It was the antithesis of the space fantasy narrative. And so, we were looking at how we can create a really surprising story for the community that makes them want to engage around futuring. And initially, we had thought it was just going to be a one-time project. It was COVID. There wasn't anything going on. And it went viral on social media, on Instagram. In Nairobi, many people were sharing it. We got a lot of articles on the project, and that was when we realised, okay, this world-building immersive storytelling angle on environmental and social change projects is really powerful. And that's when we started to explore more becoming an organisation.  

Hannah: So, what is the idea behind that collective? What is the motivation to drive you? How would you describe to someone what it is that you do? 

Ajax: I say we're an arts futurist organisation. We might be one of the only arts futurist organisations in the world. And we're centred around imaginative futuring. An imaginative futuring is when you think about what you want for the future, instead of just letting the future happen to you. So a lot of traditional concepts around futuring come from the business world, where they're trying to predict trends rather than develop a vision for what they want. And now imaginative futuring has emerged as something that is more creative, more visionary, around really thinking about possibilities for what could be rather than what we seem to be drifting towards.  

Abdul: Our goal mostly, is to develop local talent and also make use of available resources locally. So that's our main theme in most of the projects that we do. 

Willie: I feel like we end up focusing a lot more on unleashing the power of imagination and creativity in people from different backgrounds, not necessarily purely the arts, because we believe that imagination and creativity apply everywhere. And we are facing some kind of crisis in imagination. So, when we empower people and give people the tools to unleash the power of imagination, they'll be able to utilise whatever local materials and opportunities to overcome things that are both of local and global nature in terms of the challenges we are facing.  

Hannah: Let's move on from how you work together to what you've been working on. What is The Wild Future Lab, and how did it begin? 

Abdul: We started exploring what's available in the fibre industry in Kenya, to see what fibre is available and how we can use it to help get sustainable fabric in Kenya.  

Ajax: We had done sort of a general inventory of locally available fibres and projects that we knew were happening around nettle fibre, pineapple, banana, also cotton, silk. And we were thinking about creating really visually compelling local future visions with local designers. So we were working with local fashion designers, and we thought we were just going to be able to get these textiles. That did not end up being the case with any of the more experimental fibres that we were researching before the project started. All of these projects around sustainability, there's very little practical implementation that's actually happening that can really develop any of these industries sustainably. We were also working with New Order of Fashion, they do a lot of stuff around upcycling, working with different fibre producers in the Netherlands. And we soon realised, okay, we're going to have to get raw fibre and start spinning it ourselves if we actually want to even explore potentially using any of these fibres. And they had access to some open-source files for making electric spinners, e-spinners. And Abdul is basically our team engineer. He can make anything. So, we got the files and then he started working on making an actual spinner so that we could take raw fibre and make it into thread. And then we reached out to a banana fibre company, and they were having trouble making the fibre into fabric. They couldn't get it soft enough. And Willie has a background in chemistry, doing biomedical stuff. So, he started doing chemical tests on the fibre, and soon we were just way down this rabbit hole. We just wanted to make cute things with local designers, and suddenly we were like doing all this crazy production stuff. And so, this is how we ended up going from something that was very much design-oriented, it was not that technical, into quite a technical project. It became very multidisciplinary. And that has always been kind of part of our project model is to follow the research where it takes us. We could have probably just gotten some pineapple fabric from somewhere and made some cute things with some local designers. But this was like, okay, this is really interesting stuff here. And it takes this multidisciplinary team to be able to dig in deep. 

Ana: The Wild Future Lab imagines a possible vision of Nairobi in the year 2045: a rewilded metropolis, where nature and technology are deeply intertwined. Fashion, design, sustainability, and local production are all closely connected. The project asks: in such a fictional future, what might clothing, materials, or machines look like if they were designed to adapt to this kind of ecosystem? Together with artists, designers, and scientists, the collective Kairos Futura has developed wearable artefacts and futuristic garments using locally available resources. These include solar-powered jackets and sunglasses with built-in pollution indicators. It’s about making the most of what’s already available now, so that a sustainable, creative, and independent future isn't just imagined, but built.  

Hannah: What kind of things did you actually build or experiment with? Can you share a few examples?

Ajax: I think one of the most technological things that we did was creating the electric spinner, the e-spinner. We realised there’s so much extractivism out of Africa still. It's still basically this post-colonial model of raw materials being sent off the continent with almost no value added in industries. It's not a way to build the economy. And one of the biggest problems is that there's a lack of machinery and equipment.  

Abdul: Yeah, and as Ajax was saying, The Wild Future Lab started just us looking for fabric to use to make cool stuff. But in every stage of our research, we find that there is a gap here. There is a gap here. There’s a gap here. So, one of the biggest gaps, as she was saying, is the lack of tools. Like you’ll ask yourself, okay, we have banana fibre. Can I buy a spinning tool? How hard can that be? But it's not there. So, it became our quest to find a solution for it. And with the collaboration with New Order Fashion, they had open-source files for creating one. And I was able to recreate it here with the materials that are available. And it's actually working. It's a promising prototype that has really huge potential for development because it can tap into so many subsectors, like spinning flax, spinning recycled fibres from discarded fabrics, and also spinning banana fibres.  

Hannah: And Willie, you’ve tried to make the banana fibre useful for clothing, right? How did that work? 

Willie: Yeah, so this farm that operates from somewhere in southern Kenya sent us a whole bunch of their raw fibre that's really coarse. It's way off anything that could be used for a garment. So, they sent us that fibre. And then I set on doing some experiments, both mechanical and chemical, using things that could be available in Nairobi. Cause when it comes to scaling up, you'd want to rely on what's around you. So, I did the experiments. I was able to make it lighter, make it finer. And in the process, I also realised the challenges. Like I’d get it to a certain point where it's more useful, more resourceful than the course version, but for it to be reliable for actual fabric production, it will need to be an entire value chain approach. And probably more funding and bringing more people into the research process, we get it into a point where it would be usable for fabric production. 

Hannah: What is something you built or invented during the process that you're especially proud of? 

Ajax: I’m really proud of the linen. One of the things we had been researching that kind of came up through New Order of Fashion, too, was linen, and we found that linen actually had been produced in Kenya before World War II. But the cost after World War II had become so prohibitive that they stopped making it in Kenya. So, Abdul is a farmer. He grew up on a farm, and he grew an eighth of an acre of flax. It did super well. It needed no chemicals. It doesn't use hardly any water. And he harvested it, and we were able to get this fairly big, healthy crop of flax very quickly and then start to make very crude formats of these tools to prepare the flax to turn it into linen. I’m really proud. I mean, this is like going from a completely dead industry to proving that we could revive this industry with probably like a 50 to $100,000 grant, we could actually have this back as a really sustainable fibre industry in Kenya, which was super exciting and something that we're planning to keep exploring. 

Abdul: And I was so amazed at how fast they could grow within 90 days. And also, you use everything from the stem to the roots. That's what I love about flax.  

Hannah: Let's talk about the garments themselves. So, we've heard about the fibres, the materials. But your goal was to actually design something and actually make something that people can wear. And it's also not your regular t-shirt, but very special garments. What did you design? What did you create? 

Ajax: Abdul made a jacket out of a billboard, a recycled billboard, which we have tons of because Nairobi's hyper capitalist. And so, he made the jacket, and then it has a solar panel on the back of it for solar charging phones, which is a chronic issue in Nairobi. You can never find a place to charge your phone when you need to. So that one was a really cool one.  

Abdul: So for me, building locally also means we are building or we are making things that are really suited to the environments that we are living in. Because in Kenya we have a lot of sun. But I don't think we even make solar panels. We import all the solar panels. So, like Ajax was saying, capitalism has made it so difficult: you need this thing here, but you cannot get it. So our goal is to be able to make them locally and, you know, design local things that are really useful and targeted for us. The jacket, the billboard material is actually waterproof. Nairobi is always switching between rain and sun, rain and sun; it can be cold in the morning, hot in the afternoon. My jacket is built for that kind of environment.  

Ajax: I think another one of the really cool design items that came out of the Wild Future 

Lab was Abdul and a glasses company that makes glasses from upcycled wood, that is just like leftover wood from furniture; they made pollution-sensing sunglasses. They have an air quality sensor built into the side, and there's a light on the front of the sunglasses that changes from green to red when the air quality goes down. And it was like one of those things where is like design, engineering, environmental issues, all of these things kind of coming in together, new things start to emerge. 

Hannah: What do these garments also tell us about the kind of future you imagine? 

Willie: It's a really inclusive future. You see one example from one of the people who participated in the workshops. She made these really cool designs and garments that are for blind people's fashion. And that's like really mind-blowing, that’s really amazing. It's about inclusivity. It's a very inclusive future. So that's one take-away for me. 

Hannah: What can Nairobi teach other urban spaces when it comes to innovation and sustainability, or rethinking the future? 

Abdul: In Nairobi, we really recycle a lot. We take recycling seriously, like we reuse everything, you name it: tires, fabric, pallets, anything plastic. I think that's something that, if it can be developed further, that's something we can teach the rest of the world very fast.  

Willie: People find a way of using what they have in the environment to come up with really unique and interesting ideas, projects, and products. I think that element of not entirely relying on global value chains is something that we can teach the world from Nairobi. We are not helpless. We are not helpless. We can find a way of figuring things out. It just takes observation and being aware of what's in the environment and then working, crossing interdisciplinary borders, believing that there's no one person who's a genius who can solve everything. So everything, everybody comes together, and we utilise what's in the environment, and we can make really amazing stuff. So that's something that the world can learn from Nairobi. 

Hannah: Thank you very much for the conversation.  

Ajax: Thank you.  

Abdul: Thank you.  

Ana: That’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and hope you enjoyed it! Today’s episode was brought to you by Radio Ö1 and Ars Electronica. Join us next month for a new episode, and in the meantime, follow us or share the show with someone you think might like it.