At Milan Design Week, Nairobi-based collective Kairos Futura invited audiences to imagine a future where the natural world shapes identity, governance, and belonging.
Courtesy of Kairos Futura.
Kairos Futura is an arts futurist collective led by artists who use creativity as a tool for social transformation. Based in Nairobi, their work brings together designers, futurists, and community organisers to imagine new civic and ecological futures. At Milan Design Week, they presented The Ministry of Biosymphony—a speculative government agency that reimagines citizenship through the lens of natural systems. The project offered a bold counter-narrative to conventional design showcases, using immersive storytelling and participatory design to explore how we might reorganise society around ecological principles.
In this interview, core team members Stoneface Bombaa and Willy Ng’ang’a unpack the ideas behind the Ministry, from the selection of biosystems and their symbolic uniforms to the role of bionation passports and secret forest assemblies. They share how this speculative framework challenges dominant notions of identity and governance and could serve as a prototype for building a more profound kinship with the planet—and each other.
ART AFRICA: The Ministry of Biosymphony presents an alternative vision of citizenship based on biomimetic identity. How did this concept evolve within Kairos Futura’s practice?
Stoneface Bombaa and Willy Ng’ang’a: As an arts futurist collective, we believe creative expression can transcend cultural boundaries, ignite dialogue, and inspire collective action. One of the themes that we often encounter and explore in our work pertains to the future of identity and belonging, both at the individual and collective levels. During the Nairobi Space Station, we explored Nomadic Futures with ecological challenges and possibilities in mind. In our most recent exhibition, ‘Hakuna Utopia?’, the same theme took centre stage as we explored “micro-utopias” (a portmanteau of micro-nation and utopia) as pockets of hope and possibility amid wider narratives of collapse. Nairobians received a Utopia Map with six select micro-utopias and a passport that they could get stamped upon visiting these locations. Our thinking around how nationalist identities are shaped and the symbolism and mythology of nation-building informed the ideas for The Ministry of Biosymphony. We wanted to reimagine tribes and nations as groups aligned with environmental patterns and systems into a biomimetic and more ecologically harmonious form of nationalism.
The installation invites participants to become Ocean, Cloud, Mountain, or Forest ambassadors. What inspired the selection of these four biosystems, and how do they shape the participant experience?
These four biosystems helped participants contemplate new forms of kinship based on ecological relationships determined through sensory preferences and environmental concerns, besides offering a framework for collective action and sense agency. We could have chosen more subtle or obscure biosystems. The familiarity aspect meant that participants could easily engage with the concept within seconds of interacting with the installation while also fostering a more profound sense of ecological citizenship because they are systems that exist globally and thus are easy to connect emotionally.
The Ministry of Biosymphony at Milan Design Week. Courtesy of Kairos Futura.
The Ministry has a distinct visual identity, from upcycled safety vests to pollution-sensing sunglasses. How do these design choices reinforce the project’s ecological interconnection and alternative governance themes?
The Ministry’s visual identity was meant to reinforce its core themes through intentional material choices and functional design. The upcycled safety vests demonstrate ecological principles by transforming waste into official uniforms, visually representing the Ministry’s commitment to sustainability. Meanwhile, the pollution-sensing sunglasses served dual purposes: they physically connect wearers to environmental conditions by making invisible pollution visible, symbolising the alternative governance model’s focus on heightened awareness and responsibility toward our ecosystems. These Kenyan-made elements, crafted from recycled materials and local cotton, embody the project’s vision of governance rooted in ecological stewardship rather than traditional political boundaries. The overall aesthetic blends bureaucratic authority with sustainable innovation, creating a visual narrative that challenges conventional governance while proposing new relationships between humans, materials, and natural systems.
Willy Ng’ang’a showcasing the upcycled safety vests to pollution-sensing sunglasses. Courtesy of Kairos Futura.
As a speculative government agency, The Ministry of Biosymphony reimagines how we relate to nature. Do you see this as purely an artistic intervention, or could aspects of biomimetic citizenship have real-world applications?
Our intention with The Ministry of Biosymphony was to highlight how nation-states fail to address ecological challenges that transcend borders. Reorganising citizenship around natural systems rather than political boundaries exposes our urgent need for governance structures that align with rather than oppose nature. This shift reframes humans as participants within ecosystems rather than their controllers. The Ministry’s method of community-building through a chosen rather than given identity offers a prototype for post-national organisations built on ecological identities—moving us from a type of mindless tribalism towards self-aware identity structures that connect rather than divorce us from our ecology. An interactive map on our Biosymphony page will allow people to keep adding locations, challenges, and interventions with members of their bionation. We also envision organic developments from the emerging networks, with the Ministry providing a model that others can use to champion new visions for rewilded futures.
The project includes a secret assembly in a wild location later in the year. Can you share more about the intention behind this gathering and what participants might experience?
‘How do we build kinship?’ was the question that BASE Milano and the British Council asked us to consider when developing this project. Shared experiences and challenges are one of the main ways humans bond and build kinship with one another. The secret assembly, one for each bionation, will allow bio-citizens to determine where some of their members will go on pilgrimage to bury a time capsule with the bionation prophecies submitted by participants at the Ministry office during Milan Design Week. The assemblies will further cement the relationships created through The Ministry of Biosymphony. This will also be an opportunity to cultivate organic growth of the concept among participants through relationships that may arise from participation in the assemblies.
Courtesy of Kairos Futura.
Milan Design Week brings together global creatives and industry leaders. What impact do you hope The Ministry of Biosymphony will have in this context, and how do you see it influencing future dialogues on design and ecology?
We hope that The Ministry of Biosymphony provided a thoughtful counterpoint to Milan Design Week’s traditional product focus by reframing design as a tool for ecological governance. Its biomimetic citizenship model challenged attendees to consider how design might address institutional relationships with nature rather than just creating more sustainable objects. The project’s Kenyan perspective contributed valuable insights to design conversations that often centre on Western experiences of environmental challenges. This intervention may influence future design discourse by encouraging more systems-focused projects beyond materials and aesthetics to question how we organise ourselves concerning Earth’s living systems—potentially expanding ecological design’s scope and ambition.
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