In response to SaisonAfrica 2020, the saay|yaas curatorial group reimagined the brief through a mise-en-abîme approach, positioning it as an act of resistance. Conceptualized as a bureau-de-change, they established an online community for self-determined knowledge and value production, where interactions unfold through call-and-response exchanges. Each successive responder collaboratively reshapes the brief, transforming it into a collective public act of content generation. Responders, composed of African women from both the continent and the diaspora—architects, urbanists, and spatial thinkers—represent a demographic whose diverse forms and modes of spatial, curatorial and collective practice are historically excluded from normative paradigms of spatial knowledge production. This digital platform becomes a living, evolving chronicle, providing the space to counter fixed, homogenizing narratives about spatial thinking rooted in black culture. It remains in constant dialogue with the specific relationships, experiences, and intelligences that define spatial investigations in Africa and its diaspora.

Anna Nnenna Abengowe is an architect, educator, and spatial practitioner. She is an invited fellow at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2025), an academic advisor at African Futures Institute (2024), and a contributing advisor at matri-archi (2024). She is the founder and principal of The Agency: [spatial agency africa]; an agency for design thought leadership (2024). She was the deputy director and academic lead, and Unit 22 colead at the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) University of Johannesburg (2022–23). She is a coawardee of a Graham Foundation Grant (2022), a cocreator of her(e), otherwise digital platform (2021), and cofounder of saay|yaas design collective (2020). She actively develops new, transnationally relevant platforms in experimental and speculative pedagogy, research, and practice for architecture, urban, and other spatial practices across Africa.

Patricia (Patti) Anahory is an architect working across building, art, pedagogy, and curatorial practices. Anahory holds a master’s degree in architecture from Princeton University and a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Boston Architecture College. Her (re)search focuses on interrogating narratives of belonging across geopolitical, memory, race, gender constructs, and on exploring the politics of identity from an African island perspective. Anahory is cofounder and creative codirector of the her(e), otherwise platform. She exhibited at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice (2021). In 2000 she was awarded the Rotch Travelling Fellowship and served as founding-director of CIDLOT, a multidisciplinary research center at the University of Cabo Verde (2009–12). Anahory cofounded Storia na Lugar, a storytelling platform and [parenthesis], an independent space for inter(un)disciplinary exchanges, creative experimentation and cross disciplinary dialogue. She was born on a ship traveling south on the Atlantic ocean en route to São Tomé and Principe.

Mawena Yehouessi (aka M/Y) is founder of the Black(s) to the Future collective and is currently undertaking a doctorate in art and philosophy at Villa Arson and Université Côte d’Azure. Born in 1990 in Cotonou (Benin), Yehouessi holds a master’s in philosophy from La Sorbonne Paris 1 University and an master’s in cultural projects management from L’Institut d’Etudes Européennes Paris 8 University. As a member of the saay/yaas collective, Yehouessi is a codirector of the her(e), otherwise platform. From visual/digital syncretism and filmmaking to poetry writing, translation, pedagogy, study (in the sense of Moten and Harney), or making-up parties before calling them exhibitions; Yehouessi describes herself as a collisionist : an art curator, a re.searcher, and an artist. Uncaught through alter-futurisms and poïethic realities, Yehouessi develops in others words an imploratory (rather than exploratory), collaborative, and prospective practice of collage.