Chinedum Muotto
The Sankofa Protocol
A Ritual for the Ancestral Web
What if the internet hadn’t forgotten its manners? What if it asked you to listen first before giving you an answer? “The Sankofa Protocol” is a speculative fork in the road of digital knowledge. We see how Wikipedia’s “free knowledge” is absorbed by AI, erasing context and authorship. However, this future is rejected here. The work is a different kind of tool. A digital offering. The protocol responds to a self-posed question from the present not with data, but with ancient wisdom. Oral traditions are recounted, along with their history, their spirit and the conditions of their transmission. The project is not a database. It is a relationship. It opens up a world in which technology is not an extractive force, but a basis for preservation, restitution and genuine listening. We go back, not to live in the past, but to build a different future.
Concept & Realisation Chinedum Muotto
Chinedum Muotto Chinedum Muotto is a Berlin-based Nigerian-Irish interdisciplinary artist and researcher working at the intersection of web-based art, decolonial archival practice, and emerging technologies. His practice combines writing, sound, participatory research and lightweight software to question how knowledge is stored, shared and owned online. In 2025 he was artist-in-residence at ZK/U (Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik), Berlin. Recent projects include „The Sankofa Protocol (Ancestral API)“, which proposes a non-extractive interface for engaging Indigenous knowledge through provenance, consent and orality. His work draws on African philosophies of memory, repair cultures and diasporic networks, and is developed between Berlin and multiple African cities. He builds public-facing digital commons that foreground custodianship, reciprocity and accountability. muotto.com / instagram.com/mr.nogofollow
EN 
DE