Nairobi Space Station Proposes Artist-Led Solutions Here on Earth

Artist-led initiative the Nairobi Space Station will launch on 18 March with a focus on ecological issues and rewilding the Kenyan capital’s inner city.

One of the works showing at the city’s McMillan Memorial Library is a futuristic metal pod made from traditional cooking pans (which are themselves made from used oil drums) by Lincoln Mwangi. Another is Husna Ismail’s Resource Reallocation Renegade Movement, in which participants will be ‘booked’ by police for future crimes such as drone piracy, oxygen dealing, and tree smuggling.

The Nairobi Space Station is the third in a series of initiatives established as a counterpoint to the billionaire space race led by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branston.

‘At a moment when Mars is being promoted as a sexy alternative to Earth, we need to work as a global team of Earthlings to protect and appreciate our home planet,’ said Ajax Axe, co-founder of art organisation Kairos Futura.

The initiative is gaining steam, with a team of ten artists and over 100 volunteers now on board.

‘The reason we’re getting hundreds of volunteers and new members every month now is because people are excited to be part of an organisation focused on the beauty of creativity being used to take on tough issues,’ Axe said.

Axe studied art and politics at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York before working as a journalist in different parts of Africa from 2003.

She founded Kairos Futura in Lamu, Kenya, in 2021, where she immediately began collaborating with artist and Nairobi Space Station Co-commander Abdul Rop.

‘Our goal is to bring together a diverse group of artists, activists, design thinkers, and local organisations to prototype and implement community visions and solutions for the future,’ Rop said.

‘We wanted to imagine a hyper-local but exciting fantasy future for Lamu,’ she said.

The Lamu Space Station had to be postponed due to the pandemic. Returning to America, Axe tried the idea in Colorado ‘since most of the billionaire space cowboys like hanging out in Aspen’.

Axe said the success of the Aspen Space Station came from doing projects outdoors in non-traditional art spaces in the summer of 2021, a time when people were very concerned about Covid-19. It allowed her to raise funds to increase the ambition of the Lamu Space Station later the same year.

Kairos Futura’s hyper-local, community-focused art making is funded mostly by private donors and grants, but Axe said they’ve also developed a business wing that will offer creative consulting, product design, and art installations specifically focused on galvanising community engagement.

She said the business model was exciting because ‘we get to reality test our concepts without the filter of the art world which is often quite uptight and hyper-formalised.’

‘Many galleries and museums actually don’t want unrestricted creativity. They want a tightly controlled flow of monetised objects that they can commodify,’ she said.

‘What we get to do through the process we’ve designed at Kairos is be totally scrappy, go into communities and listen to their needs, see their challenges and then create creative work and initiatives on the ground in response to what we’ve learned,’ Axe said.

Nairobi Space Station will conduct events around the city through 1 June. —[O]

Main image: Courtesy Kairos Futura.