PANEL African Intelligence

African Intelligence

Organised by STUDIO 1960 ASBL & KIKK Festival
Curated by David Shongo

The concept of African Intelligence emerges from a rich intellectual landscape marked by tension, resilience, and renewal. It calls for a rethinking of how knowledge, innovation, and creativity are defined and transmitted. Inspired by thinkers such as Cheikh Anta Diop, it highlights the continuity of African epistemologies, philosophical, scientific, and artistic, as living systems that have shaped humanity’s collective history.

From the mathematical logic of the Ishango bone to the cosmological architectures of the Yoruba and Kongo worlds, African intelligence manifests through interconnected systems of thought, dynamic, relational, and deeply rooted in ecology and collective experience. These traditions challenge linear and colonial narratives of modernity, offering instead a polyphonic view of progress, where memory, imagination, and experimentation coexist.

The African Intelligence panel opens a space for dialogue around these alternative epistemologies of innovation. It explores how African knowledge systems, across science, technology, architecture, ecology, and the arts, can inspire new ways of understanding contemporary crises and building sustainable futures. Far from being a nostalgic return to the past, these traditions serve as engines for future-making: they propose plural, relational modernities capable of responding to global social and environmental urgencies.

Bringing together voices from art, science, and philosophy, the discussion includes David Shongo (DRC), artist, composer and founder of Studio 1960 and the Kinshasa Pianos Biennale; Hadassa Ngamba (DRC), multidisciplinary artist exploring postcolonial memory and quantum cosmologies; Ralph Dum (DE), physicist and initiator of the STARTS Program at the European Commission; and Femi Johnson (NG), researcher and digital heritage specialist at the Museum of West African Art and the Centre for African Studies Basel.

Together, they will discuss how African knowledge systems, digital heritage, and artistic practices can reshape narratives of intelligence, ethics, and innovation, inviting us to imagine a world where art, science, and ancestral knowledge interconnect to build more inclusive, reciprocal, and resilient futures.

Crédits photo : Cafe Kuba, David Shongo_2025