Inherited Futures

Inherited Futures grew out of two parts of Ife’s life: his work in technology and design, and his place in a long line of cultural practitioners. Designing interfaces meant thinking about how people meet information. His inheritance raised another question: what happens to knowledge carried through people, ritual and memory when the tools shaping our lives have little room for it?

That question became an artistic practice. Inherited Futures brings ancestral practices and esoteric research into conversation with AI, augmented and virtual reality, sonic design and oracle divination. The work asks how these materials might help people encounter African knowledge as something they can engage with in the present.

There is a personal responsibility here, and a wider urgency. Languages, oral histories and ways of understanding the world become harder to reach when their custodians disappear or their meanings are dismissed. The project begins with the desire to return, listen and find ways for that knowledge to keep travelling.

“From disconnected to curiously engaged.”

That is the change Ife wants the work to make possible. A visitor does not need to arrive with specialist knowledge or a settled belief. They need enough curiosity to approach, stay a little longer and ask another question.

What would our technologies look like today if indigenous African systems of knowledge had continued developing uninterrupted? What would our cities feel like? What might medicine, architecture, spirituality, communication, governance or our relationship with the natural world have become?

We cannot know. The question gives the work somewhere to begin. It opens a space to examine the possibilities inside what survived, to question what we inherited and to imagine what deserves to travel with us.

Inherited Futures places ancient objects beside contemporary interfaces. These encounters are artistic and research propositions. Each allows the project to ask what a technology values, whose knowledge it carries and what kind of relationship it invites.

Remembering becomes a practice.

The work follows a cycle: return to inherited knowledge, study and translate it, make an encounter, then ask what that encounter changes. A visitor’s recognition can become curiosity; curiosity can lead to renewed engagement with people, places and practices. What they carry forward becomes part of somebody else’s inheritance.

This is what “Remember Forward” means within the project. Receiving an inheritance leaves room to question it, improve it, remix it and build with it. The future takes shape through those choices.

The project has developed through writing, prototyping and conversations with others. These strands are at different stages: there are works you can already see, prototypes being refined and larger experiences still being planned.

The physical encounter

The exhibition is being conceived as a passage. The Veil is its entrance: an environment of layered space, light and sound that lets the visitor leave the pace and assumptions of the outside world behind. Beyond it, the proposed journey moves through fragments of memory, an encounter with Agba and participatory works before returning the visitor to their own questions.

The intention is to make attention matter. Staying still, approaching an object, listening or choosing to take part could change what becomes available. The next stage is to test how these ideas work with actual bodies, rooms and audiences.

A digital manifestation

The digital plan gives the project a home people can return to from elsewhere. It brings together the archive, interactive artworks, moving images and spaces for reflection. The archive has four ways in: Archive for the record, System for the relationships and workings beneath it, Future for speculative possibilities, and Constellation for connections across the collection.

There is room for the work to grow into educational resources, public programmes, digital tools and further exhibitions. Those possibilities will develop through the research and the people who choose to build with it.

How the work moves forward matters.

The continuing research asks who has the authority to share particular knowledge, what should remain private, how practitioners should participate and how their contributions should be credited. Historical documentation, lived practice, artistic speculation and AI-generated interpretation need to remain distinguishable. These questions shape the work itself.

The next phase calls for cultural practitioners, researchers, artists, technologists and partners willing to help test, support and sustain the project. It is an invitation to participate in what African knowledge might make possible next.