Neema Githere

Afropresentism.OS: Embodied Eco Logics and Sourealism

Neema Githere

Writer, Artist, Relational Architect, Studio Nkisi, Nairobi, Kenya.

Beyond the realm of the logic-literal is the gift (in other words, “present”) and trickster logic of encryption. As AI cannibalizes the words we lend as fossils into the deep-sea-fibre-optic-middle-America-server-farm-earth-wind-Amazon-rainforest-consequence-and-rapid-fire cloud(s), this presentation experiments with the deployment of Afropresentism.OS: a jazz-techne and pan-Indigenous intervention in service of re-pacing – in lieu of replacing – the cultural impulses that most render us human. Githere will introduce sourealism as a cyber-pidginized genre centrifugal to Afropresentism’s operating system(s). Alluding phonically to Surrealism, sourealism is anchored within the urgency of being able to claim “I am real” – “sou real” in Portuguese – amidst a world where being reCAPTCHA’d (through pop-ups that insist upon our verifying that we are not robots) is a quotidian exercise.

In Brazilian Portuguese, the word rede refers to both “hammock” and “internet” – techne that hold us with polar invocations of breath/breadth, despite referring to mirroring webbed-infrastructures. How might the this techne, and its suggestion of a net we could rest in, offer a departure/deflection point from which to weave an ecosystem of colloquial memory? What led the internet-as-machine to become a turbulent yet ever-consequential “floating homeland”? And with what consequence?

Biography:

Neema Githere Sïphone (born in Nairobi, Kenya) is a writer, artist, and guerrilla theorist whose work explores love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris.

Githere is the founder and lead artist of Studio Nkisi, a relational architecture practice producing socio-spatial interventions rooted in Afropresentism and Data Healing. Across participatory, curatorial, and socio-spatial formats, Githere’s work weaves protocols of reindigenization – prototyping what Githere terms “the Kinternet.”

Having dreamt themselves into the world through the internet from an early age, Githere approaches quotidian relationality-as-art and curation-as-spellwork. Githere has been developing a research-based embodiment practice since their undergraduate studies at Yale. Their curatorial and research-pilgrimage practice engages the #digitaldiaspora and the conditions of networked repair through cyber-cartography, with a particular focus on how descendants of exile can cultivate somatic attunement amidst systematized forms of algorithmic displacement. Data Healing – a guerrilla theory ecosystem nested within Afropresentism, both coined by Githere – emerged in 2019 as a speculative convening body committed to invoking indigenous eco•logics as antidotes to “data trauma.”

Githere has performed, lectured, and consulted at a range of educational and cultural institutions, including Afrotectopia, Princeton University, the National Museum of Qatar, Microsoft, and Twitter. Githere was co-curator, alongside Juan Pablo García Sossa, of transmediale’s 2026 edition, By the Mango Belt and Tamarind Road: Compassing, Protocoling, Metaphoring. Out of the festivals of 2026, Artforum described the pair’s curatorial collaboration as the most likely to alter the trajectory of contemporary art and art history.