Inspired by Caribbean mythologies surrounding mangroves and Afrofuturist interpretations of mangroves as a technology of resistance. One such story tells of mangroves repelling slave ships attempting to reach Caribbean shores. This workshop explores the significance of mangroves in Kenyan and Swahili storytelling and oral history—what mangroves reveal about planetary life, belonging, and not belonging.

Guest Speakers:

Laura Arminda Kingsley is an American born Dominican Artist. She currently lives and works in Dübendorf, Zurich. She holds an Associate Degree in Fine Arts from Chavón in La Romana, Dominican Republic, a Bachelor of Science from the City University of New York - Hunter College, and a Master in Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts. Her public art projects have been shown as part of “Sculpture in the City” in London (2021), “Tableau Zurich” (2023) and “Twingi Land Art” in Valais (2024), among others. Exhibition participations include the Helmhaus Zurich (2024), the CICA Museum in Seoul (2021), the Berkeley Art Center (2021), the Kamene Art Center in Nairobi (2024) and the Aargauer Kunsthaus (2023 and 2021). Her work was awarded the Dorothy & George Saxe Fellowship (2012 and 2014), the Kunstatelier-Stipendium of the City of Dübendorf, and the LOCUS Micro-Grant (2021).

James Muriuki is a Nairobi-based artist specialising in photography and lens-based media. He is interested in transitioning societies in the global south, the different knowledge systems occurring within the visual arts environments of those societies, and how these systems are enmeshed within the social fabric. James uses materials and objects of personal or communal reference, as visual elements and metaphorical symbols as illustrations of human capacity. He tugs at the threads of the interdependency of circumstance in our turbulent social frameworks: the modern and the traditional; the spontaneous and the customary; the desirable and the aspirational. He experiments with and investigates the potential of images as media and the processes of making art: photography and motion; video and sound; ultimately, as reservoirs of knowledge and channels of communication.