What Needs to Be Done
Ashanti Africana
Bio
Ashanti Africana is a Michigan-based multidisciplinary artist and creative technologist working
across interactive installation, projection, time-based media, creative coding, digital experience, and physical art. With more than a decade of experience developing visual and interdisciplinary work, her practice explores storytelling through the intersection of technology, environment, memory, domestic life, and human interaction.
Africana graduated cum laude from the University of Michigan-Flint with an interdisciplinary
degree incorporating studies in time-based media, digital communications, data analytics, and data interpretation. Her expanding creative technology practice investigates how digital systems can move beyond the screen and become spatial, tactile, participatory experiences.
She is also the founder of NAAZ Lab, an experimental art and creative technology studio
focused on projection, interactive media, immersive installation, creative web experiences,
and experiential design.
Her current work is particularly interested in the ways technology can illuminate intimate
experiences that are frequently overlooked, including care, motherhood, repetition, memory,
and the everyday rituals of home.
Project Statement
What Needs to Be Done is an interactive installation examining the repetitive and often invisible labor contained within domestic life.
Presented as an enlarged, digitized dollhouse, the work divides a domestic environment into four rooms. Inside each space, a mother moves through the overlapping responsibilities of home life: completing household tasks, caring for herself, communicating with others,
thinking, listening, and continually responding to what needs her attention.
The installation collapses physical and digital space. A computer display becomes part of the architecture of the house, while a constructed facade transforms the screen into a series of miniature rooms. Visitors encounter the work through image, sound, touch, and proximity, uncovering fragments of activity occurring throughout the home.
The work asks what it means to maintain a life when care is rarely a single action. Domestic labor becomes a continuous interface, with one task opening into another and rest existing alongside responsibility rather than outside of it.