Artist Richard Hart has lived most of his life in South Africa and is currently working on an ongoing piece of work which is indeed featured in the History 2.0 document from WGSN, referenced several times elsewhere in this blog.
He has written the following for the Curate NYC project, about his work entitled ‘How to live. Forever’:
It is a meditation on a future Africa, a speculation on how it might be without the turmoil, brutality, corruption and war that has plagued it for so long.
This is an Africa guided by the values of a morally enlightened and digitally empowered youth. Wary of its dubious legacy and suspicious of western political systems and failed economic models, the new Africa looks inwards for counsel. It turns to the ancestors. To the Nature Spirit. It marries traditional mysticism, magic and muti with technology and science, forging new mythologies and rituals. Weapons become adornments. Music, poetry and rhythm are restored as portals to the divine. Animal spirits are called upon and revered. It is the dawn of a new primitivism and a new ritualism.
This again touches on that principle referenced elsewhere in this blog of visions of the future either appearing as extremely high-tech or of returning to historical roots. Hart here is clearly looking at the latter while also creating a more utopian perception of such a future where war, corruption and upheaval no longer affect the continent.
What I like about his art is its vivid colour and often strong ideas about the history of Africa and how its future should develop. This, with pictures like the below, will be an important inspiration.
Cloneography 