Ama’s Salon
Asia Clarke
Set in the year 2056, Ama’s Salon blends ancestral African diaspora hair styling traditions with a prototyped neurotechnology, using speculative fiction as a tool to reimagine the hair salon as a site of communal and individual resistance. Ama’s Salon reimagines the African hair salon as a women-led site of community healing, self-determination, beautification and data collection. In this speculative space, each braid, twist, and adornment is part of a cutting-edge neurotechnology designed to awaken virtues, shift brain activity, diminish traumatic memories and spark emotional renewal.
Ama’s Salon’s designs draw from a deep well of African cultural aesthetics, including the Ashanti-based system of Adinkra symbolism. Central to the project is collective empowerment; continuing the legacies of hair salons as community-based institutions of individual and shared transformation. Ama’s Salon also houses a database of community neural downloads, calling for critical reflection on the future implications of data surveillance on our minds. Here, African beauty rituals become acts of liberation, complicated and politicized by the imminent struggle for rights to privacy at the last frontier: our minds.
Ama’s Salon’s designs draw from a deep well of African cultural aesthetics, including the Ashanti-based system of Adinkra symbolism. Central to the project is collective empowerment; continuing the legacies of hair salons as community-based institutions of individual and shared transformation. Ama’s Salon also houses a database of community neural downloads, calling for critical reflection on the future implications of data surveillance on our minds. Here, African beauty rituals become acts of liberation, complicated and politicized by the imminent struggle for rights to privacy at the last frontier: our minds.
Asia Clarke
Asia Clarke is a Canadian-born Afro-Caribbean multidisciplinary artist and futurist whose practice bridges African diasporic traditions with speculative visions of the future. Living between Toronto and Accra, she transforms hair into a medium of cultural memory. Her hair artistry - featured in many reputable publications like Vogue NL, Wall Street Journal, and Dazed and campaigns for Burberry, Kendrick Lamar, Free The Youth Ghana, and Daily Paper - has adorned global platforms.
Clarke holds a Bachelors in Environmental Studies: Politics from York University and Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University. Guided by her practices as a researcher in strategic foresight and international development, Clarke has worked across the world. From Canada, Ghana, eSwatini, Dominica, and Trinidad, weaving community-based knowledge into narratives of possibility. She is passionate about re-envisioning futures and helping communities, clients and brands to envision and actualize their creativity.
