You can participate via Zoom or join us on site, live in UmArts research Studio, Arts Campus, Umeå University.
Linda Dounia Rebeiz and Delali Vorgbe have been commissioned to make a new artwork called Pangool exploring the relationship between ancestral belief systems embodied in language and AI language models for the Bildmuseet exhibition ‘AI and the Paradox of Agency’ (13 March 2026 - 17 January 2027).
What happens when we treat AI not as a neutral technical system, but as a cultural and proto-spiritual artefact, one capable of holding living cultural knowledge? Pangool is an AI repository system for the Serer cosmology of Senegambia. It proposes AI as an engine for preserving indigenous knowledge systems rather than flattening them, while navigating the tension between the desire to be known by models and the right to control how one is understood. In this talk, artists Linda Dounia Rebeiz and Delali Vorgbe unpack the practical challenges of building training archives from scratch: gathering oral data through fieldwork, negotiating access to protected knowledge, patching fragmented datasets, and challenging taxonomies that flatten indigenous worldviews into Western categories.
Unpaid Labor is a multidisciplinary art and design studio established in 2025 by Linda Dounia Rebeiz and Delali Vorgbe. We currently make AI that thinks otherwise by exposing it to frameworks that organize meaning differently. We build things you can encounter online and in physical space. Our practice begins from a provocation: that AI's intellectual and moral foundations are narrower than they need to be, and that indigenous cosmologies offer frameworks for more relational, ecological, and pluralistic reasoning.