Kgotla Cosmotechnics: Negotiation Materiality and Space

This lecture explores how rural technologies, rooted in care and reciprocity, challenge dominant narratives of technological progress.

Through participatory workshops and storytelling practices, Rural Futurisms engages with local traditional knowledge systems and material traditions to inspire equitable and regenerative futures. Rejecting extractive paradigms, this work centers on community-driven innovations that prioritize care, ecological systems, and cultural heritage. By integrating traditional practices with contemporary techniques, Rural Futurisms presents alternative visions of how technology can address climate and social challenges, drawing on concepts such as Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics to reimagine technics that respond to social contexts.

This talk invites audiences to reimagine rural spaces not as peripheral, but as vital grounds for experimentation and transformation, where local knowledge and planetary care converge.

Event language: English with close-captions.

Lesego Bantsheng (she/her) is a researcher, urban designer, and landscape architect focused on rural-urban spatial dynamics in southern Africa. Founder of Rural Futurisms NPC, she examines rural materiality within cosmologies, fostering collaboration in rural and urban world-building. A contributor to Matri-Archi(tecture), she explores rural design lexicons and their influence on urban morphologies and mobilities. Her work emphasizes materiality and morphology as tools for world-making amid the climate crisis and social injustice. Lesego holds Master’s degrees in Urban Design (The Bartlett School of Architecture) and Landscape Architecture (University of Cape Town), using her practice to reimagine human and non-human collaborations beyond the Anthropocene.

Lesego portrait credits: Sophia Gunkel

This lecture is part of the Unwired Currents—Imagining Technology Otherwise free online lecture series challenging dominant narratives of design, knowledge-making, and technological progress.

May 29, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
Kgotla Cosmotechnics: Negotiation Materiality and Space
with Lesego Bantsheng (she/her)
Founder of the Rural Futurisms collective

June 19, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
Lecture
with Laura Campaz (they/them)
Visual Artist & Graphic Designer

June 27, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
On Curating and Meaning-Making: Anthropological Tools and Collective Knowledge Production
with Farah Hallaba (she/her)
Social Anthropologist & Visual Ethnographer

Jul 31, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
Afropresentism: On Incantation and the Machine
with Neema Githere (they/them)
Artist & Researcher

Aug 28, 2025  | 6 pm CEST
Healing as Technology: Reclaiming Ancestral Knowledge in the Amazon
with Bárbara Santos (she/her)
Visual Artist & Independent Researcher

Sep 26, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
MIKRO BIOCINE Speculative Ecosystem Creation through Poetry, Film, Language Games, and Hacking
with Caos Ludd (they/them)
In-disciplined Artist

Oct 23, 2025 | 6 pm CEST
Critical Imagination
with Ari Melenciano (she/her)
Artist, Designer & Educator

The lecture series has been curated by Valentina Alcalde Gómez and Adriana Palencia from the Latin American platform Matería Oscura, alongside Maya Ober from Futuress.

It is part of the Unwired Currents—Imagining Technology Otherwise larger collaborative project between the think & do tank Dezentrum and Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and Matería Oscura.

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