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In the digital era, advances in artificial intelligence are significantly transforming how we preserve, transmit, and reclaim cultural heritage. AI serves as a powerful tool to document, analyze, contextualize, and make accessible heritage that is often fragmented or disconnected from its original environment.
Woven Territories describes the pathways and journeys of various African objects since their initial contact with the West.
This study aims to reevaluate the relationships between certain Congolese art pieces—currently housed in ethnographic museums and private collections in the West—and their communities of origin.
Many Congolese cultural artifacts looted during colonization have been moved to and preserved in a limited number of museums and private collections in Belgium and other Western nations. This has created a gap in memory and cultural continuity within their communities. The focus here is on Kuba royal statues called Ndop, which are sculpted portraits of Kuba kings and serve to reconstruct the kingdom’s genealogy. While these statues are dispersed worldwide, only a few remain in the DRC, as colonizers and some dealers removed the originals after independence. Such removals have caused a disconnect between local communities and a vital part of their history.
To address this, provenance research initiatives—like the AfricaMuseum’s PROCHE project—have been established. The transfer of these objects from Africa to the West has also linked territories and imaginaries that were once separate.
From this standpoint, Melisa Kayowa explores—using artificial intelligence—the translocation of cultural heritage in a postcolonial context and the transatlantic memory embodied by Kuba royal statuary preserved in some Western museums.
This project merges traditional Kuba tapestry techniques with AI to trace the routes and trajectories of a significant part of this community’s collective memory and cultural heritage.
The aim is to contribute to reconstruction and archiving efforts.
