People
We are a diverse group of artists working together, mainly in Cape Town, South Africa. Find out more about us below, and see our Partners page for more about our creative collaborators!
African Robots is led by artist and curator Ralph Borland, who works with independent street wire artists – from Cape Town to Harare, and Maputo to Sao Paolo – and a range of technical and creative collaborators. Our process ranges from facilitating wire artists’ ideas for interactive pieces in workshop settings, to supporting, collaborating with and commissioning work from wire artists for art and design projects.
Ralph grew up in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and has been fascinated by wire art since he was a child. He studied sculpture for his undergraduate degree in Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. He learnt the creative use of electronics for his Masters degree in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. His thesis work, an interactive performance suit for protestors, is in the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art. His PhD at Trinity College Dublin focused on design for the developing world, and his post-doctoral work at the University of Cape Town advanced the idea of ‘Southern Agency‘. He works as an interventionist artist and curator. All these skills come together in African Robots, combining sculpture, interactive electronics, design, and development in Southern settings.
Lewis Kaluzi is a master wire artist who grew up in Zimbabwe and who has spent most of his life travelling Southern Africa plying his trade. He was good at drawing at school, and he was inspired by his older brothers to make wire cars. He made a mini-town to play with wire cars in, with roads and police stations and hospitals, and after school his friends would come over to play with their cars there. He was so good with wire that his friends’ parents would buy wire cars from him for their children. As an adult, he’s made giant diamonds in Namibia, life-size cyclists in Cape Town, and a range of ingenious mechanical contraptions. Ralph and Lewis met in 2015, and have worked on many projects together.
Farai Kanyemba has worked with African Robots from our first workshop, at Design Indaba in Cape Town in 2014! Hailing from Zimbabwe, Farai works in Cape Town on a range of wire art pieces, with one of his specialities being sharks – he produced a giant 3-metre long shark in finely woven wire that was an influence on our major sculptural piece Dubship I – Black Starliner (2019). He has contributed to all of our major projects at African Robots and SPACECRAFT.
We have worked with a large number of wire artists in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and a few in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo when African Robots went to Brazil in 2018. On our recent project for SPACECRAFT, DS Tableau, we had up to 10 wire artists working at one time producing the complex work we needed for the commission. Part of the work of African Robots has been identifying skilled wire artist collaborators for the project, spreading knowledge of our work, and learning about the wider wire art scene and how to engage with it.
For more about our collaborators and funders, please see Partners and Funding.