Thoughts on designing ourself out of colonialism and all its evolution

"The tragedy is not the fact that the objects aren't here, the tragedy is that the knowledge systems and the cultures and the belief systems that produced those objects don't exist in the same way that they did..." says Sam Hopkins part of the International Inventories Programme, a project that sought to make an inventory of lost Kenyan artefacts. This leaves me wondering if the same scenario won't be repeated in what feels more and more as a period of continued colonialism, redesigned to us as capitalism. 

100 years from now will Africa have access to its todays contemporary works of art that are now growing in prices, what will stop them from falling to the west again and how different will it be? I explore possibilities of knowledge preservation even as we remain powerless in the unequal distribution of capital today. Knowledge will remain more important than any commodity, so as we loose the artefacts this time we hopefully won't loose the stories that inspired them and our tied identities consequently.

The things that were extracted by western civilisations during colonisation were stored and are now still being transformed to build the capital that they project to own. With the newly designed tool, a currency now held by the perpetuators of colonialism, money may be more powerful as a weapon than the weapons they used, and maybe even more lethal to the colonised poor in these current world currencies with the extractors rich in the proceeds they created. 

When you think about current western museum collections, their sources, the revenues they generate and if there is any allocations of them to the source communities they were extracted from and belong, how do we justify this as not designed! Could we design ourselves out of such systems against humanity as beneficial as they may be to us the designers? 

Kenyan born poet and curator Emmaus Kimani intergrates fusions of people and technologies in visions for humanity. Kimani is part of the Brush Tu Collective in Nairobi, Kenya. His work has revolved around creative consulting for production and processes in design. He implements and manages, including the related people, usually more focused on artistic and cultural productions; from performance, visual arts and films. 

Discours de la Méthode with Emmaus Kimani from Kenya
Tue, 4 July
5pm
G1.104