An archival portrait meets a motherboard in Abeni Asante’s print Asante Kotoko. The artist’s portfolio identifies the photographed figure as Prempeh II, while its accompanying account turns to Nana Yaa Asantewaa and her resistance to British colonial power. The technological pattern recalls the gold inside electronic devices. Asante connects the struggle over the Asante Golden Stool with contemporary extraction of Ghanaian gold. The future is visible in the circuit, but it is answerable to people and forests whose histories began long before the device.
Asante is a Berlin-based ecologist and visual and sound artist whose practice also extends to West Africa. Their own biography describes mixed media, photography, print and collage as ways to tell stories of speculative Afrocentric futures. Field recordings, archival vinyl and soundscapes are part of the same work. The disciplines are connected by a question about attention: what changes when land is heard and seen as a living relation rather than a reserve of usable material?
The artist’s range makes the question concrete. African Futuristic Ecologies imagines Black abundance against mining economies. Abolitionist Plant Knowledge brings a forest photograph into conversation with portraits and practical plant knowledge. Cyanotypes of West African wetlands turn a photograph into a blue trace of water and vegetation. Collaborative listening events place the records of human history beside the sounds of nonhuman life. Each form changes the speed at which the viewer or listener encounters a place. The work resists the idea that a technological future can be measured only by how quickly something is extracted, connected or sold.
Asante is described as Black biracial in European Youth for Action’s climate justice publication, to which they contributed. Their practice moves between Germany and Ghana without treating either as a symbolic backdrop. It asks what a meaningful relation to a site requires: knowledge of who has lived there, how its plants and minerals have been used, and who can shape its next chapter. A ZK/U Berlin programme describes their ecological work as African futurist and abolitionist. That pairing names an ambition visible in the images. A future becomes imaginable when the present terms of ownership and depletion can be changed.
A portrait, a circuit, a claim on gold
Asante’s portfolio identifies Asante Kotoko as a digital and printed work from 2025, with an archival photograph of Prempeh II. The text accompanying the print invokes Nana Yaa Asantewaa, queen mother and anticolonial leader. A motherboard in the background connects that historical account to the gold used by today’s technologies. The work joins objects with sharply different cultural meanings: a stool whose importance rests in the life of a people, and electronic infrastructure whose manufacture depends on material supply chains.
The title draws on a call to resist British colonial power. Asante’s accompanying narrative does not leave Nana Yaa Asantewaa as a figure to admire at a safe historical distance. It gives her a speculative role in deciding how gold and forests might be used now. In the artist’s imagined account, permission from forest spirits precedes extraction. Gold serves spiritual and transformative technical purposes. The order of those actions matters. Technology arrives inside a relation with land, rather than authorising the taking of land before questions can be asked.
The motherboard gives the image a present-day urgency. Gold is useful to electronic circuits, and Asante’s portfolio explicitly connects the work to the environmental and human damage of illegal mining in Ghana. The work does not oppose all technical invention. It asks who has the authority to decide what invention is for. A circuit can be a sign of possibility and of extraction at the same time. The historical portrait and the accompanying account of Yaa Asantewaa keep that double meaning in view.
The image also complicates a familiar visual sequence in which Africa appears first as ancient heritage and then as raw material for a future built elsewhere. Prempeh II’s portrait occupies the print, while the accompanying text gives Nana Yaa Asantewaa an active part in imagining what happens next. Her story brings historical resistance into a technological decision, while the forest has a claim that cannot be reduced to its market value. The speculative gesture lies in changing the terms of who is invited into the design of what comes next.
Another work in the same series, Yaka, turns toward coltan and a mask form associated with Yaka communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The artist describes an image in which a Kakunga mask and the mineral used in electronic connectivity meet as sources of advanced power. It is a different encounter from the one in Asante Kotoko. Gold enters a composition with an archival portrait and a queen mother’s story; coltan enters a vision of a mask with new capacities. The series has no single formula for joining ancestral forms and technology.
Yaka is also a challenge to the gaze that sees a ceremonial object as a dead artifact while seeing a phone component as modern. The work lets the mask exceed that division. Its relation to physical and spiritual worlds, as the artist describes it, becomes a way to imagine connection beyond a device. The coltan reference brings the device’s own material origins back into view. A reader or viewer may enter through the striking image, then confront the fact that global connectivity has a geography of mines and labour.
Asante’s portfolio account says the series uses photographic moving collages made from material including leaves and masks photographed in Bahia, Brazil, in 2024. These loops connect the African continent with the diaspora across the Atlantic. The moving form matters because the works refuse to rest as illustrations of a single inherited identity. Leaves, masked figures, historical references and circuitry can return in altered relation. A loop repeats, but a viewer’s attention changes with each pass. The future appears less like a destination than a way of revisiting what is already present.
Plants that carry a record
Abolitionist Plant Knowledge approaches liberation through another material archive. The series combines botanical images with the histories of Black women’s resistance and practical knowledge of plants. Works appeared in a limited-edition zine made with Spore Initiative in 2024 and 2025. The pages move between portraits, forests and remedies. Their printed form allows the work to be held and passed on, while the plant knowledge directs a reader beyond the page to soil, bodies and care.
One image, Kakum, uses a photograph Asante made in a Ghanaian forest. A forest picture can become an anonymous sign of lushness in a tourism campaign or a conservation brochure. Here it has a specific name and place, and appears within an argument about ecological knowledge and autonomy. The trees are not merely a soothing background for a human story. They belong to the conditions under which that story can be lived. Asante’s use of their own photograph anchors a larger political question in a particular encounter with landscape.
Harriet places Harriet Tubman in an assemblage of cowrie shells, brass hoops, dried plants, ecological resin and pigment. Asante’s work description focuses on Tubman’s use of landscape, stars and herbal knowledge while guiding people away from enslavement. In the artwork, plant matter and ornaments are not decorations around a famous name. Their presence presses the viewer to understand liberation as an embodied practice of navigation, care and risk. A freedom route depended on what a person could read in the sky, find in the ground and do for someone vulnerable along the way.
The assemblage refuses a clean line between historical memory and usable knowledge. A shell can refer to trade, adornment or ritual without being exhausted by any one of those readings. A dried plant may be visually fragile while recalling practices that helped people survive. Resin fixes materials in a work that will itself need care to endure. The piece asks a viewer to attend to the practical intelligence that heroic narratives often leave out. It also gives the zine a purpose beyond commemoration: the final pages include plant remedies and allies for readers in the diaspora, according to the artist’s portfolio.
The Spore Initiative’s workshop description frames Asante’s plant teaching around Black and Afro-diasporic histories of herbalism and community care. That public activity sits beside the zine, but it is distinct from it. The artwork can slow a reader before an image; a workshop can bring people into conversation about practices they may share or adapt. Both refuse the disappearance of knowledge that colonial violence has tried to make ordinary.
Krull’s first-person essay View From The Kitchen offers a useful companion in a different medium. The writer describes the kitchen as a place for preserving roots through food and making a present-tense contribution to others. Asante’s zine works with plants and liberation histories rather than family cooking, yet both pieces show how memory can remain active in ordinary material practice. The link extends the reader’s question from a printed artwork to a lived room.
Wetland in blue
Asante’s cyanotypes of West African wetlands bring another process into the ecological work. Their portfolio identifies photographs from mangrove ecosystems, riversides and Atlantic coasts as the source material. All Waters takes a site in Grand-Popo, Benin; Mangrove Rhythms names a forest near Busua in Ghana. The blue printed image is a transformation of the photograph rather than a transparent window through which the viewer can claim to possess the place.
The wetland is a threshold in several senses. Land and water meet there; roots may stand in brackish ground; air, tides and animal life change its appearance. Asante’s series description adds spiritual and ecological relations to those visible crossings. The work does not need to make every one of them literally visible in one print. Its title and material form encourage a viewer to hold more than one mode of attention at once. The place is a physical ecosystem, a site of knowledge and a subject of imagination.
The blue of cyanotype can make a wetland seem dreamlike, but the listed locations keep the image from drifting into an invented nowhere. Grand-Popo and Busua have their own histories, communities and environmental conditions. Their names direct the viewer outward, toward sites that will continue to change after the print is made. The speculative dimension lies in how those places might be understood and cared for. It does not erase their present reality.
Sound accompanies this visual practice. Asante says that field recordings and soundscapes can open ways of sensing ecosystems and imagining more-than-human life. A wetland cannot be reduced to a photograph because much of its activity is heard, felt or hidden below a surface. A recording can carry insects, water or human presence into another room, though it cannot replace being there. The movement between image and sound makes a viewer conscious of the limits of each medium. What the cyanotype holds still, a sound can let pass in time.
In 2025, Asante and Anguezomo Nzé Mba Bikoro brought plant histories, sound and Black feminist memory to Refuge Worldwide’s Plant Stories. The programme describes a collective practice involving storytelling, poetry, testimony, herbal knowledge and sonic archives. The collaborators’ shared work can be heard as an extension of Asante’s ecological method, though its authorship belongs to both artists. The radio form matters: a listener receives voices and recordings in a sequence, without the fixed path of a gallery wall or printed zine.
The ground as a future place
Asante’s artist biography describes participation in building a residency space and forest garden near Cape Coast. Their Black Wendland project page describes another collective effort in rural Germany, rooted in Afrofuturism, reparative justice and abolitionism. That project began with a gathering in 2021 and, in the artist’s account, has moved through funding and legal structures toward land acquisition. The language is practical because land cannot be made available through an image alone. A place for people to live, make art and grow things needs money, agreements, work and long-term care.
The collective project is not a finished artwork that can be hung beside Asante Kotoko. It is one of the ways the image’s question enters material life. If the print asks who may decide the future of gold and forest, a land initiative asks who can secure space for Black people in a countryside marked by unequal access. These are different scales of action. Their connection shows why Asante’s speculative art repeatedly returns to land. A future that cannot be inhabited remains an attractive picture with no ground beneath it.
In the studio work, a historical portrait meets a circuit; a mask holds the possibility of a new power; a forest photograph becomes part of an abolitionist zine; a wetland turns blue in a print. In the listening work, sounds from plants, water, records and voices meet across distances. None of these materials promises an easy repair. Their relation makes an ethical demand: technology, history and ecology have to be considered together by the people who will live with their consequences. Asante’s future takes shape when a resource is recognised as a relation, and when that relation changes what a maker is willing to build.