Dreamed Native Ancestry (DNA)

About

//The Mission crew has travelled back from the future. There, the human population is dying out due to a quest for genetic homogeneity, which has led to a weakened and disease-prone human race. Cultural accumulation has ceased and humanity’s knowledge growth, technological advancement and story-making capabilities have come to a standstill. Future humanity is on the brink of extinction. The Mission crew is tasked to travel through time, collecting samples, stories and knowledge from the cultural and genetic richness of humanity’s past – particularly at points of concentrated migration and cultural exchange – to deposit in a vast human memory vault that will re-seed the human race of the future//. 

Dreamed Native Ancestry (DNA) inhabits an imagined scenario, drawing on Afrofuturist philosophies to explore and celebrate the stories, experiences and knowledge of diaspora peoples through a lens of technoculture and science fiction. The name of the installation playfully challenges the authoritative and seemingly concrete answers given by ancestry DNA testing to complex questions of who we are and where we come from.