Adorned Memory: Reimagining Egyptian Indigenous Archives Through Jewellery by Khanya Mthethwa
As part of the Afropean Intelligence Residency Program.
Challenge “Archives and Memory”
The selected project
Adorned Memory: Reimagining Egyptian Indigenous Archives Through Jewellery
Adorned Memory explores Nubian adornment traditions and how jewellery acts as a living archive of memory, identity, and resistance. Through community collaboration, oral history, and digital experimentation, Dr Mthethwa will create sculptural jewellery pieces that reflect ancestral knowledge, cultural survival, and creative speculation. The project merges traditional and digital tools, including AI, to reflect on what is remembered, what is lost, and how history is carried through wearable forms. It aims to activate relational ways of archiving that honour embodied memory and cultural continuity.
Host institution
B’sarya for Arts, Alexandria (EG)
European partner
CHRONIQUES, Marseille (FR)
The artist
Khanya Mthethwa
Dr Khanya Mthethwa is a South African multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose work explores adornment, indigenous knowledge, and memory. With a background in jewellery and a PhD in Art History, she merges oral storytelling, speculative design, and digital tools to reimagine how archives live through the body.
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& Check-out the other selected projects for the Afropean Intelligence Residency Program:
+ Challenge 1: Intercultural AI: Weaving Worlds through Art and Algorithms | “Untangler: Worlds Reimagined” – Peace Olatunji
+ Challenge 1bis: “Decoding Egwu: reclaiming indigenous intelligence through AI, dance and Igbo” – Emmanuel Ndefo & Dan Xu
+ Challenge 3: Plural Computation | “The Affogbolo’s Home” – Pierre-Christophe Gam
+ Challenge 4: Psychogeography and the Influence of AI | “Bursting the last bubble” – Tamer Elshabrawy
+ Challenge 6: ZaZi: An African Educational AI Model | “LORAS AS AN ARCHIVE – A LIVING ARCHIVE” – Evans Akanyijuka
+ Challenge 7: Beyond Borders: AI, Climate, and Resource Justice in Africa | “Cry To The Water” – Chipo Mapondera
+ Challenge 8: Digital Lukasa: An Intelligent Archival Tablet | “The Memory Performer: digital reincarnation of Luba wisdom” – Mahoutondji Kinmagbo
+ Challenge 9: Provenance and Social Memory | “TERRITOIRE TISSé: Art Royal Kuba entre tradition et (R)évolution” – Melisa Kayowa
+ Challenge 10: Futurism and Geolocation | “Mobility as Memory: a decolonial AI cartography of Kinshasa” – Chinedum Muotto
+ Afropean Intelligence is bringing together 10 cultural organizations across Africa and Europe:
