Al 7aqeeba (pronounced Al haqeeba) is a speculative project that examines the possibility of Afrofuturism as a design aesthetic to help African orality survive. This survival is not only limited to simply passing down stories from one generation to the next, but understanding the networks of the moral systems from preceding generations that created these stories. Each generation created their own unique elaboration of the culture that they inherited, which allowed for its expansion, yet our generation is facing this same challenge with a growing number of diaspora communities who only know their culture through secondary resources. Al 7aqeeba provides a mere suggestion that Afrofuturism, given African youth's, both nationals and diaspora communities, inclination and dependency on technology to know, understand and share their culture, is the natural way to expand upon traditions, thereby, helping them survive.

Using Sudan as a case study, the project outputs are iterations of an Ancient Meroitic monument marking events during the reign of Amanirenas, whose story is still told in Sudan to this day. These iterations consist of 5 evolutionary transitions; from ancient script to a speculative commercialbinary code magazine, the last of which serves the purpose of exporting the culture back to Sudanese youth using a designated diplomatic package commonly known as 'Al 7aqeeba' in Arabic, or simply the 'Diplomatic pouch' in English. The iterations form a novel journey, one where the transitions are there so that the spectator can see not what is lost in translation but rather what is maintained.

zarougriham@gmail.com