Tracing The Wild

Tracing The Wild is a partnership between Sovereign Nature Initiative and Kenya Wildlife Trust. Featuring the work of artist Chuma Anagbado and data architect Daria Smakhtina, this project was led by creative producer Seth Bockley, SNI's Director of Creative Engagement, and premiered at Nairobi Design Week 2023.

Built from data reflecting the biosocial interactions of predators and human communities in the Mara, this artwork is one way to express the life of these rare creatures who are protected by the innovative conservation organisation Kenya Wildlife Trust.

The outcome is a new dynamic data-driven art project led by Nairobi-based artist Chuma Anagbado alongside creativity hub Nairobi Design in collaboration with data architect Daria Smakhtina and SNI’s Director of Creative Engagement Seth Bockley. This initiative visualises predator data from Kenya Wildlife Trust (KWT) as a series of digital and physical data-based ‘portraits’ along with interactive artwork created in collaboration with tech developers, designers, and story gatherers.

This project harnesses data from lions' patterns of territorial movement and conflict with humans in order to represent the predator ecosystem in Kenya's Maasai Mara region as a dynamic human-nonhuman collaborative artwork, providing a vivid and emotionally affective experience of scientific knowledge and real-time health of nature.

Tracing The Wild features Chuma Anagbado’s hardwood-etched portraits of three specific lions, known to the conservation community as Mama Kali, Naramat, and Sintamei, alongside Daria Smakhtina’s renderings of these animals' movements as 3-D digital sculptures.

You can check the entire Tracing the Wild Digital Art Collection here.