Nyambura M. Waruingi

Nyambura M. Waruingi, based in Nairobi, Kenya is the founder & Creative Director of Akoia & Company that develops, curates, produces, and collaborates across various artistic expressions, encountering unique ways to imagine new worlds through trans-media and immersive storytelling, focusing on producing extended reality experiences.

She is a cultural activist, producer, and disruptor with a 20-year career in film, television, theatre, and visual arts. She has worked with award-winning production companies, renowned public cultural institutions, and innovative film and visual arts collectives in Canada, Kenya, South Africa, Rwanda, the USA, India, UK, Uganda, and Nigeria. Gaming is her new frontier.

Please introduce yourself and provide an overview of what you do?

My name is Nyambura M. Waruingi. I am the curator for immersive media and I am part of the virtual art gallery that everyone practising in immersive media will be participating in. I own a creative enterprise called Akoia & Company which curates and produces projects, which merge cinema, visual arts, gaming and immersive technologies.

Why did you start Akoia & Company?

I moved from Montreal to Nairobi to start Akoia & Company as I felt my career hit the ceiling in Canada. I was getting work as an independent producer which was great but I felt that Africa was ignored at times when it came to immersive technologies I wanted to explore in particular to the mobile because in Africa that is where our audience is. I am the founder and creative director so, my concentration is on the creative development process and growing creative properties.

What projects have you worked on that can better explain your work at Akoia & Company?

Currently at DOK Leipzig’s networking and inspiration programme in Germany at the DOK exchange which focuses on interactive and immersive storytelling with a focus on VR and AR works. The project I am working on is called “The Ground Screams to Whisper.” It is a transmedia experience about female militant independence and agriculturalists because they were stolen from villages and brought to farmland for the colonial project of tea and coffee. They have been erased from our kind of independent struggle documentation in terms of their presence but these women caused a lot of problems for the colonial administration. They participated in riots and put money together to finance one of the founding fathers, you know, so they were important in our history that we do not acknowledge. I was interested in what the stories of these women would be? How can we do an interactive, immersive experience to get to know their lives, joy, struggles and how they survived but importantly how they thrived in their very harsh environments of being taken away from their families and therefore being stripped from their rituals and traditions and how they kept their language alive. So that is the type of storytelling I am interested in which is the unearthing of our histories in creative and innovative ways. That is actually how I came to Fak’ugesi, dillion discovered me on the internet.

Share more about how dillion discovered you and how the connection came to this opportunity?

dillion expressed that he has been looking at my work around immersive media. I had started a curatorial practice called #immersivejuakali which means entrepreneur in Kiswahili. It is about trying to bring together different work and inquire into location-based work and all types of stuff. I wanted to make it happen but I didn’t know where people were so I started knocking on the different silos and then learning about different workarounds in Africa particularly South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal were strong at the beginning and now Kenya and Tanzania are joining in. That is how dillion and I met and he asked if I would be interested in curating for Fak’ugesi. I had been fanning out about the festival for quite some time, so it was an immediate yes because I wanted to be part of this amazing energy. I loved what Tshimologong was doing in South Africa because we don’t have that in Kenya. I am hoping to continue with immersive Jua kali.

Please tell us more about immersive Jua Kali

When we talk about the Jua Kali sector, it’s about the entrepreneurial sector, it’s about working for yourself and making your own life. It was about making so I drew from that because my question around immersive media in Africa is as if we are making links in the international kind of space, but how are we making our own immersive work? What are the trajectories we’re taking, which is important, because particularly in Africa, for me, and coming here in the 90s, when you have this information, and communication technologies for development, saying they are going to save Africa, Africa is going to finally join the world it felt like tech and art were going to solve problems? It raised many questions for me. How are we doing for ourselves? Are we building our own audiences with this type of interactive work? And how is technology a tool and platform for creativity?

Immersive Jua Kali is about linking art, audience and technology while making it clear that technology is a tool for this and that as creators we are pushing technology and asking for it to be better in some ways where it becomes inclusive even for someone who cannot see to participate in an XR experience by haptic feedback or having Braille in exhibitions.

What can we expect from the talks you will be having?

There are two talks that I have concentrated on, one is on storytelling methodologies where I am asking different creators what theories are emerging from their art and learning from the practices they are using and how they are creating immersive work. For example, some are creating for Instagram and various platforms. I want to know what drives them in terms of ideas and artistic traditions.

“I always say don’t think about the tech first think about your story...”

Beyond the headset, what types of immersive experiences are available on WebXR, there is one creator who is putting together a virtual museum that is accessible through the headset and the Web. It’s important to have these chats because no one has figured it out. It’s still fertile ground. The talks will help in building our audience across the different platforms they have access to.

Tech language is often a border that stops us from participating in tech creativity. What are your thoughts on this? How can we make the jargon more accessible and understandable for the audience and curious creators?

A lot of jargon stops us from participating and particularly tech is a highly masculinized space mostly men working in this spaces more or less than women not because women do not want to but we have to start by addressing the attrition rate of girls in schools and what they’re allowed to study but also getting into the space itself the jargon at times is used to obfuscate to keep them from access. Now that collaboration in tech is being supported it makes it easy for innovation to be created. The next step is how do we translate this tech into different types of languages because English has a force that supports ageism and classism and can mark someone as “uneducated” and all the negative things that are baggage to English in an African context.

What I started to do in Immersive Jua Kali is to exist in the social aspect of immersive media and I tried talking about making using technology without being jargon oriented. I always say don’t think about the tech first think about your story and from there you can partner up with a VR world builder, a 3D artist or an audio engineer to explain your audio cues this will break down the hesitancy to imagine and even participate as artists who don’t feel like they have the technical capacity.

Using this year’s theme of “build coz you have to” how will your work in the programme illustrate this?

Immersive Jua Kali started because they had to build a space for someone like myself to actually exist in immersive media making an environment that was technologically driven. So it became a journey of trying to find other people and what they were doing. My educational background, coming from critical cultural studies and Communication Studies background I had to sit down and interrogate who makes these decisions and why are immersive works being shown in festivals in Venice or Toronto but I don’t get to watch it. This led to the development of the two modules that are part of the festival, which are looking at how the creators are creating outside of the conventional understandings of immersive media and going beyond the headset. How are these technologist artists thinking through how it can be a tool for heritage?

The festival will seek to highlight how different people who are part of the talks, the galleries have been building because they have had to find a way to make their art so it tells a story and it makes sense to them. It didn’t come out of a place of just scarcity because at times you may not have this adapter. No, it’s not what I want, it is what I’m responding to. And this is why I’m also finding my audience. So I feel that’s how we come together and really being part of a festival with the ethos of building is important even just a notion of Jua Kali, is an expansive look at the possibilities it can be on the web, phone or call it in a location, where we have video productions and watching the multiplicity of immersive experiences will be shown in a way, a new way of making 3D worlds. We’re still evolving. We are seeing artists in Congo, technologists from Ethiopia and we are hoping to see more coming from different parts of Africa. I want creators to not feel afraid and to feel like they know and to be comfortable with this type of artistic expression.

How do we create sustainability within the field of Immersive Media?

I feel that sustainability is important but I feel it is built on an audience to produce immersive media for. This means we create for an audience in mind and create so they can arrive at the content through the technologies and platforms they have already. We need to start building an ecosystem that can allow creators to produce and market what they’ve done and generate sales or distribution. We need to develop a distribution chain around it. Immersive media doesn’t only have to exist in an art culture space it can go into different industries and that’s when sustainability comes in.

Interview by Anastatia Nkhuna IG: @akoiaco