Cry to the Water by Chipo Mapondera
As part of the Afropean Intelligence Residency Program.
Challenge “Beyond Borders: AI, Climate, and Resource Justice in Africa”
The selected project
Cry to the Water
Cry to the Water is an immersive, AI-facilitated ritual experience exploring how ancestral knowledge, particularly Tunisian water rituals, can shape ethical, spiritually grounded uses of AI to address climate and cultural crises. The project activates the ecological knowledge embedded in ancestral rituals to respond to water scarcity, climate crisis and resource justice, by developing a community-led dataset and ritual AI system trained on oral histories, ancestral archives and Tunisian climate data. Through spatialised sound and generative, interactive visuals, the installation evolves through a system designed to resist extractive, colonial logics and instead operate as a relational technology, creating a space for healing ecological grief, deepening cultural connections and envisioning sustainable futures grounded in ancestral intelligence.
© Image: Le Sefseri : l’incarnation de la pudeur à la Tunisienne,1970 (Archival image)
Host institution
INTERFERENCE, Tunis (TN)
European partner
CHRONIQUES, Marseille (FR)
The artist
Chipo Mapondera
Chipo Mapondera is a Creative Technologist at the intersection of African heritage and emerging technologies, who channels the ancestral continuum through digitally facilitated experiences and speculative design. Rooted in ritual and indigenous technologies, her work synthesises tradition and a multilayered, diasporic artistic expression, offering contemporary portals into ancestral memory and knowing.
& 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 5: Archives & Memory | “Adorned memory: Reimagining Egyptian Indigenous Archives Through Jewellery” – Khanya Mthethwa
+ Challenge 6: ZaZi: An African Educational AI Model | “LORAS AS AN ARCHIVE – A LIVING ARCHIVE” – Evans Akanyijuka
+ 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:
