WeTransfer Guest Curator
The Nairobi-born theorist and artist Neema Githere’s multifaceted work spans writing, coding, community organizing and travel, viewed through the lens of Afropresentism, which focuses on the various states of Black and African diaspora experience today. Underpinning all of Githere’s work and practice is a foundation based on healing and indigeneity—an uninhibited love and respect of the land. The artist has been selected by Olafur Eliasson, as part of his guest curatorship for WeTransfer. Githere tells Ravi Ghosh why it is important to embody and practice the vision of who you want to be.
The work of Neema Githere is best understood as a complex, winding relationship with the internet—one which can be traced chronologically, but by no means trends in one direction or is just positive or negative. “The internet is my tool and my opposition,” they tell me from their Los Angeles apartment. The Nairobi-born artist was part of one of the first generations to come of age online, with Tumblr, microblogging, gaming and forums defining the early-to-mid-2000s, before today’s social media platforms became widespread. These are not just the markers of our entry into adulthood, Githere believes, but the mechanisms by which we perceive, self-fashion and develop social consciousness. Their current practice reflects years of “trying to create visions of what you want to be and do in the world” while trying to navigate “algorithmic distortion, coercive marketing and self-marketing.”
This takes the shape of writing, coding, community organizing, image-making and curation, as well as the coining of new terms which serve as umbrellas for Githere’s research. This began with the #Digitaldiaspora project, which examines how Black diasporic people use the internet for identity-formation. The community initiative also traces how Black and African people innovated in the early race for cyberspace—and “how the Afro-diasporic experience is manifesting on and offline.”
Then came Afropresentism, a shifting concept which addresses the various states of Black and African diaspora experience today. The term began as a “genre fusing archives, documentary, and fine arts through new media in the expression of an Afrofuturist lived reality,” Githere writes, but has now expanded into a unifying principle for their publishing and world-building projects, both in person and online. What does the term mean today? Afropresentism is a “temporal rebellion; a collage of invisible arts, specifically sound, memory and a desire that comes from beyond flesh,” Githere says.
From afar, Githere’s work may appear as a variation on Afrofuturism, which is the fusion of African diaspora culture with technology, sci-fi and speculative futures across literature, music, film and poetry. Afrofuturism, particularly in the work of writers like Octavia E. Butler, is “the mothership vision that gave me a lens of understanding cyberculture from a Black and African lens,” Githere explains.
But the LA-based artist is more concerned with the present—and recent history of Black and diaspora experiences online—than the future. The #Digitaldiaspora project took its name from media historian Anna Everett’s book, “Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace” (2009). Afrofuturism has also undergone something of a “pop-cultural dilution,” Githere argues, morphing from a radical theory into a digestible aesthetic. With our contemporary existence so rich and complex, why always look beyond it? For the #Digitaldiaspora project, Githere waded through thousands of hashtags looking for different phrases and trends across the Black diaspora. They then used Instagram’s geolocation feature to “chart these emergence points across the Black world,” leading them to spotlight communities who are often overlooked or mischaracterized, such as Black Brazilian women, whose oversexualization and misrepresentation as mostly white troubled the artist.
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I long to be able to embody the archive of my ancestry as it flows through my heart, veins and spirit.
Githere recently completed a practitioner fellowship at Stanford University’s Digital Civil Society Lab, where they continued to work on “Data Healing: A Call for Repair.” The project was originally conceived as a “speculative convening body,” where people could gather and discuss their relationship with the internet and specifically, Instagram. Githere was running a community space in Brooklyn at the time, and noticed that there were very few in-person spaces to unpack the “data trauma” we experience from today’s internet abundance. Shame was the emotion that seemed to unite everyone—“shame around our fixations and our compulsions; our inability to control how much we’re on these platforms” and the “behavioral modification that we experience,” Githere says, quoting computer scientist Jaron Lanier.
To combat these feelings of alienation, Githere has published an online workbook described as “a combination of theory, near-future speculative fiction, code poetry, screenshot essays and reflection exercises.” The content draws upon Githere’s own teenage internet usage: they have made digital collages bringing together their earliest edited Tumblr self-portraits with recent photos from when they actually traveled to the locations in question for #Digitaldiaspora. “We’re at this wild juncture point where the internet has created microgenerations,” they explain. Someone born in 1997 will have experienced a completely different online environment to someone born just two years later, discrepancies that “Data Healing” looks to bridge.
The aim is to help readers reconsider—and ultimately, re-code—their relationship with Instagram. Githere includes short predictive texts from 2027 onwards, imagining what a digital rehabilitation clinic could look like if funded by Big Tech itself. The workbook also features journaling prompts, poetry written in the C Sharp programming language and screenshot essays. It is like a new operating system, Githere says—a framework for people to live by and function within. And like an OS update, the workbook will also incorporate reader feedback and be released in new versions in the future.
Although technological in focus, the book—and all of Githere’s recent work—is underpinned by Indigenous philosophies of land. If “mycelia are the original internet,” then the Earth is the original antecedent of the world we inhabit today. “Nature is where data healing and Afropresentism come together,” Githere explains, nourished by recent travels to volcanoes in Djibouti, rural Southern Angola, Vanuatu and Fiji. Indigeneity is about “an uninhibited love and respect of the land—a commitment to belonging to the land and letting the land belong to itself and no-one else.” This requires extra care for the African diaspora given the history of displacement which enabled slavery. As these communities may not have access to written records of their ancestry, paying attention to histories held within the land, plants, fossils and water sources is a solution. “I long to be able to embody the archive of my ancestry as it flows through my heart, veins and spirit,” Githere reflects.
This is the direction Githere will pursue over the coming years, they tell me. Moving from New York to LA will enable deeper research into the Black Pacific, while also connecting Queerness to the feelings of alienation explored in “Data Healing.” Re-Indigenization is the aim. “A lot of folks talk about decolonization, but to me re-Indigenization is a more useful framework,” Githere says. “It’s decomposing colonial ideals but then working towards a re-memory of Indigenous ways of being.” It is not about embracing or rejecting the internet, but processing it via multiple knowledge systems. “My work is an expression of that complexity and that contradiction, and that possibility, and that exasperation.”
