INTERVIEW Michelle Michewicz
PUBLISHED 9 AUG 26
Chipo Mapondera is a creative technologist of Zimbabwean Rozvi ancestry, exploring her lineage through an intersection of African heritage and immersive technology. Her work channels the ancestral continuum through embodied storytelling, sonic environments, and ancestral knowledge.
// How would you describe your artistic practice?
My artistic practice centres on activating Indigenous water knowledge through participatory, community-based art and emerging technologies such as AI, immersive media and spatial storytelling. I work at the intersection of ancestral knowledge, climate justice and technology, exploring how Indigenous ways of knowing can offer alternative responses to contemporary challenges such as water scarcity, environmental degradation and our increasingly extractive relationship with the natural world. Rather than treating technology as separate from culture, I am interested in how it can become a space for ceremony, memory and collective imagination.
// What kind of relationship do you have with art?
For me, art is a way of bringing people together. It creates a space where communities can reflect, collaborate and imagine different futures together. It is also a way of experimenting with technology and proposing alternative technological imaginaries that are rooted in care, reciprocity and Indigenous knowledge.
I see art as an embodied experience. Rather than simply communicating ideas intellectually, I want audiences to encounter them through space, sound, movement and emotion. Art allows people to experience complex questions around climate, community and technology in ways that are collective, sensory and deeply human.
// What motivates you to create?
Experimentation has always been at the heart of my practice. Before becoming an artist, I worked as a software engineer, but I was always searching for more creative ways of working with technology.
Today, what motivates me is the opportunity to bring together innovation, creativity and my own cultural perspective. I want to explore what happens when emerging technologies meet Indigenous knowledge systems, and how those encounters can generate new ways of thinking about the future while remaining deeply rooted in place, ancestry and community.
// How do you usually work? Can you describe your creative process?
My process begins with research. I spend time investigating questions around climate, water, technology and alternative social and ecological futures. This research is both academic and ethnographic, in the field. It involves reading, but equally importantly, spending time with communities, listening to stories, participating in cultural practices and learning directly from place.
From there, ideas gradually develop into artistic concepts. Collaboration is fundamental throughout the process. Whether I am working in Zimbabwe or with communities in other parts of the world, the work is shaped through dialogue.
Finally, I experiment with creative technologies, including AI, immersive environments, sound and interactive media, to translate these collective experiences into embodied artworks. I enjoy pushing technology beyond its conventional uses, asking how it might become a medium for ritual, care and cultural memory rather than simply efficiency or automation.
// Which moment of the creative process do you enjoy the most?
It is difficult to choose between community engagement and creatively experimenting with technologies. I love spending time with communities, listening, learning, and discovering unexpected ideas together. At the same time, I genuinely enjoy the process of building immersive experiences and experimenting with technology.
The most exciting moment is when those two worlds begin to merge, and stories, research and relationships take shape through sound, interaction and space.
// How do you know when a work is finished?
A work is finished when it communicates what it needs to communicate with clarity. There is always the temptation to keep refining, but eventually there comes a point where the work is able to stand on its own.
That said, I do not believe the artistic exploration truly ends. If given time and space, a project can continue to evolve through exhibitions, conversations, workshops, publications, and new collaborations. One project often becomes the foundation for the next, so my practice feels less like a series of separate works and more like an ongoing conversation.
// What is your contribution to SEE DJERBA 2026, and how does it connect to this year’s theme, AKROSS?
My contribution is Cry to the Water, an immersive AI installation that brings together Indigenous water knowledge, community narratives, climate data and ritual practices to explore alternative relationships with water.
The work emerged through research with water healers and communities in Zimbabwe before expanding into dialogue with Djerba’s own water histories and cultural traditions. Rather than presenting these knowledge systems as isolated, Cry to the Water creates a meeting point between them.
For me, this speaks directly to the theme of AKROS. It is about crossing geographies, cultures, histories and technologies while recognising the relationships that already exist between them. Water itself is a perfect metaphor for these crossings as it moves across borders, carries memory and continually connects people, landscapes and generations.
// Did the festival’s theme influence or transform your artistic approach?
Absolutely. The theme encouraged me to think beyond comparison and instead focus on relationship. Rather than presenting Zimbabwean and Djerban water cultures side by side, I became interested in the conversations that could emerge between them.
It reinforced the importance of working through reciprocity, exchange, and listening. The project became less about representing knowledge and more about creating a space where different ways of knowing could encounter one another, which is reflected in the story within the piece.
// What does entanglement mean to you?
Entanglement reminds me that nothing exists in isolation. We are constantly shaped by relationships with one another, with the environment, with history, and with the technologies we create.
In my practice, entanglement also challenges the idea that Indigenous knowledge and emerging technologies belong to separate worlds. I believe they can inform and shape one another in meaningful ways, opening possibilities for more relational and ethical technological futures.
// Can you describe a personal experience that made you reflect on the idea of entanglement?
Working on Cry to the Water transformed my understanding of entanglement. Beginning in Zimbabwe, I worked with Indigenous knowledge holders whose relationships with water are deeply spiritual, ecological and communal. Arriving in Djerba, I encountered different traditions, histories and rituals surrounding water.
Although these cultures are geographically distant, I began recognising shared concerns around drought, memory, social progress and care. The project itself became an entanglement of communities, stories, technologies and landscapes that continue to shape one another.
// What do you hope visitors experience when they encounter your work?
I hope visitors feel present. I want them to slow down, listen and become aware of relationships that often go unnoticed between themselves, water, community, ancestors and the environment.
Rather than simply observing the work, I hope they feel part of it, becoming participants in a shared experience that invites reflection, curiosity and care.
// What would you like people to take away after seeing your work?
I hope people leave with a renewed appreciation for Indigenous knowledge as something living, contemporary and deeply relevant to the challenges we face today.
I also hope they reconsider what technology can be. Instead of seeing AI solely as a tool for optimisation or efficiency, perhaps it can also become a medium for memory, reciprocity, storytelling and environmental stewardship.
// Do you think art should ask questions, provide answers, or both?
I think art should primarily create space for meaningful questions. The most important questions rarely have simple answers.
At the same time, art can offer possibilities rather than solutions. It can invite people to imagine different futures, experiment with new perspectives, and discover forms of knowledge that conventional systems often overlook.
// What inspires you outside the art world?
Nature is my greatest source of inspiration. Spending time in forests, rivers, caves and landscapes reminds me that the natural world is an intelligent system with its own rhythms, relationships and forms of knowledge. It continually reshapes how I think about ecology, technology and our responsibilities to one another.
Beyond this, I am inspired by Indigenous knowledge holders, ritual practices and conversations with communities. These encounters remind me that knowledge is not only held in books or institutions, but also in landscapes, oral traditions and lived experience.
// Is there an artist, writer, or thinker who has significantly influenced your practice?
My practice has been shaped by many voices rather than a single individual. Indigenous knowledge holders and elders I have worked with or learnt from have profoundly influenced how I understand relationships between people, land and water.
In terms of thinking about AI, the Slow AI project was massively inspiring. It helped me connect some of the dots that I was thinking about AI and made me realise that my ideas on indigenous approaches to technology were feasible and worthwhile.