Techno-Ancestrality
This exhibition gathers works that approach technology not as a story of accelerated progress, but as a layered field of ancestral memory, inscription and survival. Textile, script, ceramic, image, sound and data become intertwined registers through which knowledge moves, adapts and endures. What emerges is an expanded understanding of technics – one that precedes the digital and extends beyond the industrial, rooted in practices that have long sustained collective life.
Where oral traditions face erasure, new writing systems are forged to secure them. Patterns carry social bonds and cosmological orientation across generations. Clay receives the trace of global metrics, returning financial abstraction to material ground. When genetic data promises definitive origin yet falls short, space opens for narrative reconstruction and critical fabulation. Mapping loosens from its colonial function of demarcation and becomes a means of holding contested memory. Sound travels as chant, frequency and coded transmission, sustaining presence across distance and time. Through such acts, technology is situated within longer histories of adaptation and obligation rather than novelty alone.
The works suggest that technics take shape under pressure – revised, re-inscribed and carried forward as conditions change. Invention here is inseparable from inheritance. Processes unfold gradually, sustained across generations and reactivated when survival demands it.
This is not a nostalgic return. Continuity appears as an active, negotiated practice. Innovation depends on what has been carried forward; sovereignty and collective life find room within systems of extraction through inscription, weaving, counter-coding, ritual and strategic refusal.
The exhibition of the IMPAKT Festival 2026: Techno-Ancestrality is a proposition: that the tools shaping our futures remain entangled with older forms of knowledge, and that the future itself is accountable to those who have sustained it.
Artworks on show at IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture]: Artcom Platform, Mounir Fatmi, Voluspa Jarpa, Kongo Astronauts, Inty Muenala Vega & Yauri Muenala Vega, Navid Nuur and Russell Watson
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Artworks on show at BAK Basecamp: Jimmy Carillo, Angelina Kumar, Isaiah Lopaz, Thania Petersen, Marcel Pinas, aniara rodado and Lorena Solís Bravo & Beáta Kolbašovská
Read more about the Exhibition at BAK Basecamp
Credits: Kongo Astronauts, Aisle of Dreams, 2019