A collection finding its voice.
Grown over decades, this archive holds 1,178 objects from twelve African countries — from the twelfth-century laterite monoliths of the Nyonyosi to the expressive masks of the Babanki master carvers of the twentieth century.
Until now, knowledge about these pieces lived in handwritten index cards, in faded black-and-white photographs, and in the collector's memory. With this digital archive we move that knowledge into a searchable, citable form — so that researchers, curators, and future interested parties can grasp each object in its full ethnographic context.
Our approach
For each object we combine four layers of documentation:
- Visual analysis via multimodal AI — with grounded web search verifying every statement.
- Terminological correction — misattributed terms (people's language, object names) are fixed against sources.
- Peoples' dossiers from independent deep research — one per people, covering ritual world, aesthetics, and history.
- Contextual enrichment — each object is linked to its people's dossier so that individual piece and tradition refer to one another.
Status
As of today, 992 objects are fully documented. The remaining 186 objects are passing through the same process — visible once the analysis is complete.