Dk-Osseo-Asare & Yasmine Abbas, Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP), Spacecraft_ZKM, 2018. Mixed-media installation, 282.50 x 300 x 550cm. Commissioned | Digital Imaginaries: Africas in Production, November 17, 2018 – March 17, 2019, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany.
Test set-up of the Spacecraft_ZKM in the Agbogbloshie scrapyard, Accra, Ghana, 2018. IMAGE: AMP MAKERSPACE COLLECTIVE
Yasmine Abbas and Dk Osseo-Asare are co-founders of the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP) in Ghana, a pan-african joint project that has been developed in the vicinity of the Agbogbloshie scrapyard located in the district of the same name in the metropolis of Accra, Ghana. AMP combines the practical know-how of local makers in the informal sector with the technical knowledge of students and young professionals in STEAM fields. The AMP Spacecraft represent mobile architectures, which as mobile, incremental, low-cost, and open-source kiosks invite to the imagination of different prototypical usages.
Within the framework of Digital Imaginaries, different spacecrafts were implemented in Dakar, Senegal and in Karlsruhe, Germany. With the aim of transfer of know-how between Ghanaian makers and local craftmen and workshop participants at the respective exhibition venues, the kiosks were designed in different configurations and thus adapted to the needs of the context surrounding them. While in Dakar, the Spacecraft_KT was used as satellite of the FabLab Defko Ak Niëp in public space; the Spacecraft_ZKM exhibited indoors contained the prototype of a smart canopy or “scanopy,” device to collect air quality data and explore opportunities to amplify environmental sensing in data-scarce regions.
The AMP Spacecraft was assembled along with design faculty and students from the Karslruhe Institute of Technology and the ZKM inhouse team after the exhibition opening – this was meant as a “building performance” that highlighted the collective nature of designing and making the Spacecraft . The spacecraft has been used subsequently for the Season of Media Arts, Karlsruhe, Germany © Photograph: GRÜNSCHLOSS FELIX
IMAGE LEFT: © Photograph GRÜNSCHLOSS FELIX
IMAGE ABOVE: Ghanaian Maker Nicolas Tali being filmed for an open-source tutorial on how to assemble a low-cost pollution sensor © Photograph ABBAS, Y.
At the festival Afropixel #6, grassroot makers customized the AMP Spacecraft to create a mobile extension of Kër Thiossane, a Senegalese cultural space. Here the Spacecraft_KT is installed on Mon Super Kilomètre / URBI, Gueule Tapée, Dakar, Senegal. 
Read our contribution: Dk-Osseo-Asare & Yasmine Abbas, &Spacecraft: Building an Afronautics Program, in Richard Rottenburg, Oulimata Gueye, Julien McHardy, Philipp Ziegler (Eds) 2021. Digital Imaginaries: African Positions Beyond Binaries. Kerber.
