Wùn Ná Kre
Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, for the Ancestral Immediacies (AI) Festival and the exhibition Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations.
In May 2026, I had the pleasure of showing my first-ever installation work titled Wùn Ná Kre in Ghomálá, meaning “Walk This Line”; a phrase addressed by a parent to a child as both a call to obedience and an invitation to defiance. I chose this title as it evokes the tension between following a prescribed path and finding the courage to depart from it.
It is an immersive and participatory installation that explores the conditions through which we perceive, produce, and recognise knowledge. As part of the AI festival, the work questions the ways in which our humanity is translated into data, rendered legible to systems, and shaped by models that seek to predict and immobilize us. As part of Tirailleurs, it tells a story of emancipation in the face of erasure, honouring the histories and stories of the Senegalese Tirailleurs—particularly from the Serer community—and reflecting on the continuities I perceive between their historical reduction to colonial categories and the ways human lives are digitalized today.
The work unfolds across two states. Before its activation, visitors encounter a simulation that can only fully reveal itself when they remain still. This constraint stages a relationship in which organic life must suspend its movement for the model to appear stable and its prediction infallible. The simulation presents an Afrofuturist and spiritual vision inspired by Serer cosmology and my own imagining of what life within the Sirius A and B binary system—named Yoonir in Serer—might look like.
The activation is a distinct event: a collective reading and dialogue around the ideas, knowledge systems, and questions that inform the work. Following this encounter, Wùn Ná Kre changes state. The environment becomes responsive, inviting the public to explore, play, and interact with it freely.
Through this transformation, the work contrasts two possible relationships to intelligence: one grounded in neutralization and prediction, and another in relation, movement, and transformation.
I am sincerely grateful for the opportunity and for the work and support of the teams at HKW and my collaborators, as well as the participation of the attending audience who made this experience possible and alive.
Activation event | Photo credit: Justus Lemm.
