Salome Asega
November 12, 2019
Between undergrad at NYU and graduate school at Parsons, artist and researcher Salome Asega began conceptualizing a project that would connect her far flung friends, a group of activists and artists who shared a commitment to free expression and social justice. She imagined a platform that would foster community and spark conversation across geographic divides. Salome pursued an MFA in technology and design in the hopes of making that dream a reality. Five years later, though, Salome hasn’t developed an app for revolutionaries. Instead, she’s become the physical embodiment of the technology she hoped to create. Salome is the node, the web, and the amplifier.
Salome’s day job is at the Ford Foundation, whose mission is to reduce poverty and injustice worldwide, where she serves as a Technology Fellow in a role she designed herself. Her mandate is simple: Only connect. Salome’s task is to support agents of social change, be they creatives or community organizers, by pairing unlikely collaborators across industries and by introducing individuals to new media that might enhance their work. Her job exists precisely because no algorithm can approximate the kind of imaginative, ingenious social networking that comes from a combination of deep knowledge, political urgency, and — fundamentally — profound empathy.
The project of Salome’s that first captivated me was Iyapo Repository, co-created with Ayodamola Okunseinde. Salome and Ayodamola partner with cultural institutions to lead hands-on workshops where participants, specifically people of African descent, “generate and build technological cultural artifacts of their future.” The workshops begin with a question: What will the future be like? That question is answered through action: participants draw objects from the future they imagine and prototype them using VR, 3D printers, and code. Iyapo Repository becomes the physical location where those designs are archived and also a theoretical space where the present and future collide. The work is representative of Salome’s larger practice in that it is open-ended and all-encompassing: it is a prompt, a process, and a place all at once.
When we met to make portraits for this piece, Salome had just moved into a new apartment and was without internet — the Verizon guy hadn’t shown during his appointed window and Salome was stuck offline. The predicament seemed fitting as a backdrop to our ongoing conversation, which highlighted the ways her process relies on technology but ultimately transcends it, showing human networks to be the most indispensable part of her art and activism.
On her journey from there (Las Vegas, advertising) to here (New York, art) and how a global community shaped her very personal approach to technology
Salome Asega: I’m the child of immigrants, first-gen, Las Vegas resident. My parents came to the US because they fled a difficult time in Ethiopia politically. My dad loosely worked in marketing in different venue spaces in the casinos, the MGM Grand Theatre and The Palms. Through watching him work, I became excited about how events came together. I was interested in how people build stories around congregation. There is some overlap between that early interest and my work now. I knew I wanted to go into a creative industry and, because I was first-generation, I wanted to be able to land in an industry sector where I knew I would get paid.
At NYU I thought I was going to go into advertising. I took all of the 101 Communication courses and I realized, especially as someone who is interested in ethics and protocols and why we are doing what we’re doing — and because I have strong values that I was very unyielding about at 18 — I couldn’t stay with advertising. I transferred to Gallatin [the school of Individualized Study] and I landed on studying social practice. I was interested in socially-engaged and community-engaged art-making practices. I was really inspired by works like Project Row Houses and Rick Lowe. I wanted to make things that brought people together, that existed in some sort of public realm. I wanted to make work that also impacted the way cities work and the ways we make social contracts — work that was beautiful but that was also about people and connecting and infrastructure.
Right after graduating from NYU in 2011 I went on a monthlong trip to Ethiopia and then extended the trip to go to the West Bank to visit friends. Leaving my friends who are all artists and organizers behind in New York to go be with other friends who are also artists and organizers in Ethiopia and then landing in Palestine where my friends are musicians and, just by nature of where they are, are also very active politically, in that moment I was thinking about how we could build models and learn from each other’s stories. I thought: I have to build some sort of social site for activists! I have a strong background in community-organizing so I was thinking about how technology could help us and connect us. At that point, I wasn’t thinking that much about technology critically.
I went to grad school and did my MFA at Parsons in the design and technology program. I went in thinking I was going to become a web developer; I wanted to make useful things. Parsons is really where a whole new world was opened for me.
On being a critical creator; making work for and with a group; assuming the identity of artist and then reimagining that role
A lot of my art practice has been at the intersection of creative inquiry and tech exploration. There has also always been a social justice and access element to my work. I’ve always been interested in making interesting things through aesthetic exploration, but at the same time that I’m playing with these new tools, I want people to understand the backend, what’s really making these pieces work. What, if any, social implications do these technologies have for people as they move forward in society? It is not part of my practice to create something that is rarified and then sold. That was not a conscious decision, it’s just not how I work. So many of the things I do are immaterial. The real work is in the process and how, with other people, we create models for making work together.
All of my projects are co-created. I’m interested in making with other people and seeing what they can bring to the table. I’ve always been the person in a group who was the facilitator, wanting to make sure everyone feels included and has time and space to introduce what they know. I don’t know where I learned that role but I do know that growing up, my mom took me very seriously at every age. Whatever I was bringing to the table, she saw it as equal. Maybe it is just a conversational habit I picked up on from her that asks, “What are you thinking? I see that you’re a little quiet over there, what do you have to say?”
Feeling comfortable calling myself an artist has been a gradual process. I didn’t really feel comfortable [doing so] until grad school. I just thought of myself as an organizer who wanted the moments in which we met to be beautiful. My impulse is to say that becoming more credentialed doesn’t matter but I think, for me, entering spaces (like those offered by residencies) gave me access to people who could teach me how my own work could look. There isn’t really a name for what I’m doing so it wasn’t until I entered spaces that were holding hybridity that I was able to understand all of the ways I could survive. I think that’s why so much of my work now is getting out of institutional spaces to realize how I can do work in community. When I’m able to get out and work with other types of organizations, there’s a richness in multiplicity.
On Iyapo Repository, a futurist archive Salome co-created that is designed to be continually iterative
I created Iyapo Repository with another artist, Ayodamola Okunseinde. We applied to do a residency at Eye Beam together and started creating it there. [Iyapo hosts] workshops at different cultural institutions where we get people to take on this identity of archivists from the future. They play a card game with us to get them thinking about imagined objects that could represent technological and cultural artifacts of their future. Then they draw the artifact ideas on manuscripts that we save, collect, and encase in acrylic in our archives. In the workshops the participants will rapid-prototype some element of their artifacts; they’ll do that with some basic computing kits or will use VR to draw some aspect of their design in 3D space, or we’ll have a laser cutter and a 3D printer to use. After, we look at the manuscripts closely and really analyze which are the drawings we can fully realize and then we build those out. Those physical artifacts sit in our archive. Some of those are used in films, so that they can be seen in context and those films also sit in our archives.
We completed a pretty big iteration of the project last year in Pittsburgh. We participated in a visiting artist fellowship with a new media festival based in Pittsburgh called VIA and worked with Carnegie Mellon and the August Wilson Center. Now Iyapo Repository is doing something with Pratt Institute (I’m not part of that iteration): they’re working on a VR project about gentrification around Clinton Hill and Bed Stuy.
On her job at the Ford Foundation
I’m at the Ford Foundation as part of a larger initiative the foundation is pushing around public interest technology. In the ways that Edsel Ford was an active and instrumental player in building out a field of public interest law, right now the foundation wants to ensure that in today’s society technology is also cared for and protected and exists in service of the public good. Ford supports a number of fellowships that embed tech-lensed people in civil society organizations to help them think about these issues critically, to beef up their tech capacity and literacy. While they were doing this work, they were like: We should also embed these tech-lensed people in our own program areas.
My program team, Creativity & Free Expression, covers arts and culture, investigative journalism, media, and documentary film-making. We support artists, media-makers, and film-makers who are doing really amazing radical social justice work, pushing really powerful justice-oriented narratives, who themselves come from identities that are under-recognized. I’m embedded and trying to get the team to think about how they can support artists working with new media. A lot of my job is collaborating with other teams to figure out points of intersection where we can support amazing organizations out in the social justice and art fields. It’s super abstract.
Something that I am able to do is bring people into certain conversations, conferences, and meetings that might not be able to get there without some support or recognition. Whenever I enter a space, I’m always trying to think about how to keep the door open and who could benefit from also being in that room. I can connect people who are very much aligned and can bolster each other’s work.
On specific projects at Ford that exemplify her goals of connecting activists and artists with complementary interests
The Ford Foundation’s original endowment comes from Ford Motor Company, so we have a responsibility to continue doing work in Detroit. For a year now I’ve been thinking about Detroit’s capacity for tech innovation and about the history of techno and what impact techno has on Detroit’s cultural landscape, about the role that techno and a nightlife economy can have in supporting the city. Next week we are hosting a conversation in Detroit with a group of techno musicians (Underground Resistance, Moody Man), scholars, people from the city agencies, and funders. My hope is that everyone will learn about techno and maybe something will come from that conversation. It’s not for me to decide but I can get all of these people in the same room.
At the same time that I’m planning this techno event, I’m planning another event in the Bay Area about the role of futurism and speculative thinking in social justice work and how it could be a powerful instrument in propelling us toward more just futures. We are bringing together some key futurists to tell us how they do their work. Generally, I think it’s very easy (when you’re a more progressive person) to be in a position where you’re reactionary, always reacting to something the ‘other side’ did. I have been thinking about how we can get out of this lane of reacting and begin imagining and dreaming of the futures we want to see and driving towards that. That’s exactly what conservatives do: they know the world they want to see and they are stomping in that direction. [Ed note: These events took place in September.]
On the balance between personal and institutional work
There have been moments that have been really challenging when I felt like this job pulled me away from my art-making because I spend 40 hours a week in an office as opposed to spending that time getting inspired and going to do work. I’ve tried to maintain my practice on the weekend and in the evenings. It’s been tough. I maintain a book of ideas, a book of things saved for when this fellowship ends [in February], when I’ll hit the ground running with that work. It has been important to me through this fellowship that I maintain this identity of artist because once this job ends I want to go back to making. I felt like I was really onto something when this job started, I was just finding my groove and how I wanted to make and think and who I wanted to partner with. I was making models for myself. I don’t want to lose my momentum.
Part of me feels like after this fellowship ends I’ll go back to having a studio practice more fully and I’ll teach, but the other part of me thinks about how I just dipped my toes into something and how I was really able to advance very important work and be a cheerleader for really amazing people and I want to continue that in some way. But I don’t know if I want to stay in philanthropy. When I think about how change happens, I don’t know if philanthropy is the solution. I want to be closer to the ground. Philanthropy is hard because you’re pulled in so many directions; there is so much bureaucracy involved in how a grant gets out the door. I want to do the fun stuff like learning about people’s work. I’m interested in packaging research for institutions so that they can understand what’s happening now.
On teaching, carving out space to both push and play intellectually, and giving as good as you get
I knew I wanted to teach so part of my intention in choosing the Parsons program was picking somewhere I would want to return to. There were things that were missing from my undergrad experience that I wish I could have contributed. The richest conversations I have ever had were in college. It is such a luxury to have time and space to really pick apart a question or an idea and I love the nitpicky-ness of it, really grinding, really getting down to a fine powder.
The class I co-teach this semester is called ‘Major Studio,’ it’s the required core class that all of the studio majors have to take. It’s basically, especially in this first semester, where students develop an understanding of their creative process and name the kinds of questions they want to be asking through this program. They start to define the kind of forms their work will take. They’re naming the edges of their creative practice.
Everyone is working on something completely different. It’s fifteen people who all have their own interests and there is some overlap but, for the most part, I’m thinking about how I need to push forward thirteen different people who are thinking about thirteen different issues, from fashion to climate to how to make the internet more accessible. In doing that work, they bring to me all of their references that they are reading, listening, and watching. I take that in, and I tell them, “I’m learning so much from you.”
