UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Yasmine Abbas and DK Osseo-Asare, assistant professors of architecture and engineering design at Penn State, are among the invited artists whose works are on display in the “Africas in Production” exhibition at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.
The exhibit is part of the Digital Imaginaries project, which began in spring 2018 with events in Senegal and South Africa before heading to Germany. Throughout the year, partners, including Kër Thiossane, an independent art and multimedia center in Dakar (Senegal), the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival, and Wits Arts Museum, both in Johannesburg (South Africa), collaborated on a series of distinct but connected programs, including workshops, seminars, talks, performances and exhibitions. These activities were designed to “bring together artists, architects, makers, hackers and researchers to question and reimagine how globalized technologies shape and shift African futures."
Penn State’s submission to the exhibit stems from the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP), founded by Abbas and Osseo-Asare in Ghana. AMP is a youth-driven community-based project that couples the practical know-how of makers in the informal sector with the technical knowledge of students and young professionals in the science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) fields to amplify inclusive innovation.
Abbas and Osseo-Asare’s AMP project has received international attention, winning the Rockefeller Foundation’s Centennial Innovation Challenge Award, being named the Africa 4 Tech Digital Champion for Educational Technology (EdTech) and the Design Corps Social Economic Environmental Design (SEED) Award for Public Interest Design. Most recently, the duo received seed funding via a Penn State College of Arts and Architecture faculty research grant to advance their “spacecraft” research around community-enabled materials design research, which is currently ongoing with a number of graduate and undergraduate students at the University Park campus.