A Space for Critical
Design Thinking
Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness
Russel Hlongwane , Francois Knoetze & Amy Louise Wilson
Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness
Russel Hlongwane , Francois Knoetze & Amy Louise Wilson

Dzata is a creative research project by South African artists Russel Hlongwane , Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson. In fabricating a fictional institute and its archive, the artists explore and imagine vernacular technological practices operating across the African continent. An intertextual conversation between the documentary and the poetic, the video series operates as an in-house media assemblage created for the preservation of the institute’s activities and ideas. The project aims to foreground indigenous technological knowledge and to explore how science, technology and innovation are part of a long interlinked process of accumulative knowledge production which extends long into the past.