Wuh.ey - “Mvuke wa Kwanza”

From the series: African Fusion
Paper: Hahnemühle Fine Art Archival Print
Sheet size: 60 × 60 cm
Year: Edition of 2025
Edition: 3 + 1 AP

Wuh.ey – “Mvuke wa Kwanza”

A dancer steps out of the shadows, his body painted, his face white as a sign of transition. Holding smoke in his hand, behind him a line of young men—witnesses, disciples, mirrors. Above all, a sky hangs heavy and electric, as if the world were holding its breath. "Mvuke wa Kwanza" —the first smoke—evokes initiation, transformation, the moment between childhood and awakening.

Here, Wuh.ey lets artificial intelligence hallucinate a scene that oscillates between ethnographic memory and a spiritual future. The AI ​​doesn't invent a ritual; it remembers one that never took place—fed by thousands of images, myths, and gestures. Thus, a new kind of visual memory emerges: the machinic dreaming of the human.

In many African cultures, the white of the face marks the transition to the sacred, the entry into an in-between world where the body becomes a medium for spirits. The smoke—once a carrier of prayers and ancestral voices—rises here from a synthetic vision. Wuh.ey combines ancient symbolism with the aesthetics of digital ecstasy: between trance and code, between the camera eye and artificial perception.

The dancers become avatars of a new spirituality. They embody not the exotic, but the eternal—movement as a language of memory. Their naked bodies, firmly anchored in rhythm, contrast the incorporeality of the machine that created them.

"Mvuke wa Kwanza" is not an ethnographic depiction, but a techno-animistic vision: AI as a shaman who visualizes the invisible. In this work, Wuh.ey recreates the relationship between spirit and technology—sensuous, dignified, and beyond any nostalgia.