There is a vibration in the work of Mankebe Seakgoe. Not the kind that demands attention, but the sort that lingers — an undertone of frequencies just out of reach. Through sculptural gestures, sonic propositions, and a tactile language of material interferences, Seakgoe engages the infrastructure of feeling, where time, data, and ritual converge.
In her most recent body of work, we are drawn into a field of inquiry less concerned with solutions than with attunement. Seakgoe’s practice opens a space where transmission and translation are never fixed. Instead, they emerge as moments of becoming — transient signals that speak to histories encoded not just in archives, but in the land, in sound, in the body.
Working with copper, clay, salt, and other conductive materials, Seakgoe treats technology not as a tool, but as a medium. Here, technology is porous. It hums with breath and memory. Her installations often take the form of semi-functional systems — radio circuits that relay static, objects that oscillate between sculpture and device, and environments that suggest both ritual site and lab apparatus. In these speculative ecologies, we encounter technologies that listen, that remember, that forget.
Her works do not reproduce the logics of industrial modernity. Rather, they unsettle them. By turning to African cosmotechnics — ways of knowing and making that refuse the severance of spirit and system — Seakgoe draws us into a techno-spiritual continuum. This is not futurism in the conventional sense, but rather a return to the future as an ancestral proposition: plural, nonlinear, and deeply embodied.
One such gesture appears in a recent installation where a field of terracotta vessels, embedded with copper coils, emits a low-frequency soundscape recorded from beneath the earth. The hum is almost imperceptible, a kind of ground-tone that recalls the subterranean conversations of root systems or the breath of dormant archives. Here, sound is not performance, but residue — a trace of information moving through matter.
The artist’s relationship to sound is not aesthetic embellishment. It is epistemic. Her works propose listening as a method, as intervention. By working with the limits of audibility, she foregrounds what is excluded from dominant regimes of sense — insisting on the right to opacity, to slowness, to silence.
If there is a central question her work holds open, it is this: What does it mean to design with care, in dialogue with unseen ancestors and unbuilt futures? In refusing the spectacle of legibility, Seakgoe invites us to sit with untranslatability — to approach knowledge not as possession, but as relation.
Ultimately, her installations operate as transductive zones: not quite archives, not quite instruments, but something between. A matrix of signal and soil. Of speculation and sensorium. Of coded pasts and possible worlds.