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Inkaya Studio

@inkayastudio

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Rooted in community-led ancestral knowledge and creative ecological practice. Building collaborative futures for women and youth in Zambia.

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Welcome to Inkaya. If you’re new here, here’s a little more about who we are and what we do.

Inkaya is a youth and women-led community initiative based in Zambia. We bring together ancestral knowledge, climate education, and creative practice to help build futures that are more rooted, just, and sustainable.

We work closely with rural women and youth artisans, supporting them to develop their skills and preserve their culture through craft. By combining tradition with new ideas, we aim to create meaningful opportunities and positive change.

Inkaya is a space that holds and honours ancestral design and the land, while pushing the boundaries of what sustainability and craftsmanship can be. It’s a place where community comes together to reimagine our futures through the practice of making. One that’s about more than just physical creation. It’s about remaking how we value the land, our heritage, and each other. We look forward to continuing to share in the coming together and making of this community rooted in love and radical possibilities for a renewed future. by @inkayastudio

Meet Chanji.

We first met Chanji Ndemela in Musokota in April this year. She was walking with a flock of chickens trailing closely behind her. Ranay (@renneclus ) immediately connected with her, being the only person on our team who could communicate with her in sign language. Although communication was limited for the rest of us, we could tell there was a warmth about her which stayed with us.

Since then, we have been thinking about how Chanji could be part of the construction of the Inkaya Community Studio and our wider programming. Today, she is one of the women from Chisakila and Musokota helping us gather matombo (rocks) from around our site to build the studio’s foundations.

After many conversations with our quantity surveyor, architects and community consultants, we settled on using locally gathered stones for the foundations. It allows us to work with materials already present in the landscape while reducing our reliance on concrete. These decisions are part of a wider process of learning how to build with greater care for the soils and ecosystems that sustain us.

There is something extremely fulfilling about returning to that first meeting and now working alongside Chanji on a place that will, in time, belong to the wider community. The studio is still taking shape, and so are the relationships that will hold it together. by @inkayastudio

When I began looking for a place to build the Inkaya Community Studio, I was as concerned with where we would build as I was with what we would build. It was clear that the studio had to be rooted in an underserved community, but I was also asking a deeper question about land, access and who gets to belong along the banks of a river.

Across many places in Zambia, riverside land(s) have been acquired by private interests, including foreign investors, with fences and boundaries that often sever local communities from water bodies they have lived alongside for generations. These enclosures alter more than access to land, they disrupt relationships between people, their livelihoods, their memories and the wider living worlds sustained by these waters. Choosing a site along the Kafue River in Chisakila (which sits between the Kafue and Lower Zambezi Basins) was an act of decolonial planning. It was an opportunity to imagine a different relationship with land and water, one that does not begin with the question of ownership, but with the question of responsibility and kinship.

A river cannot be understood as the possession of a single person or organisation. It moves beyond imagined boundaries, sustaining human and more-than-human life, shaping ecologies, histories, and communal ways of living. These waters belong to a MUCH wider web of relations than any title deed can contain. (Currently reading The Serviceberry by @robinwallkimmerer which speaks on reciprocal relationships with the natural world, and feeling extremely inspired to delve deeper into this work)

At @inkayastudio, we are working towards a community-oriented practice of stewardship, where access and belonging are not privileges reserved for a few, but part of how we collectively relate to the places that sustain us. We are not simply building a studio beside a river, we are radically reimagining what it might mean to build with a place in relationship with its people, its ecologies, and the generations who will come after us. 🟤 by @inkayastudio

Over the past weeks, we have been speaking with thatching practitioners in Chisakila and across Zambia as we learn more about working with this material for the Inkaya Community Studio.

For us, thatch is a future-facing ancestral material. We are actively researching the grasses used for thatching in different parts of Zambia, learning where they grow, when they are harvested, how they are prepared, and the knowledge that surrounds working with them. Much of this is being learnt through conversations with people who have spent years working with these plants and understanding what makes them suitable for shelter.

We are also looking beyond Zambia, paying attention to the ecological and aesthetic knowledge held in buildings across the continent. The image here is of a Nyamwezi home in Tabora, Tanzania, photographed between 1930 and 1950. We are interested in these forms not as templates to reproduce, but as part of a much larger body of knowledge about how people have built in relationship with their climate, landscape and available materials.

There is something compelling (and frankly, necessary) about the simplicity of building with materials that already belong to the landscape. In the hot Lower Zambezi climate, the breathability, shade and passive cooling thatch offers make practical sense, while the knowledge held around the material gives us another way to think about what climate-smart building can look like.

For us, this is not about looking backwards. It is about understanding what has already been learnt, and seeing what those knowledges might make possible for the future.

Image reference: Roger Fouquer (1906–1993), Tabora, Nzega District, Tanganyika, 1930–1950. Nyamwezi. Musée de l’Homme Photographic Archive, PP0074776. by @inkayastudio

During the IZINTU residency, we spent a day walking almost 10km through the Lower Zambezi heat and uphill to the Bwelenunka Bat Caves with Gerald Mapondela, a farmer, father and our neighbour in Chisakila.

Gerald taught us about the relationship between himself and the bats who call these caves home. The bats leave behind guano, a nutrient-rich natural fertiliser, which Gerald and other small scale farmers carefully collect and carry back from the caves to enrich their fields.

After the long hike back, we crossed the river by boat from Chisakila Harbour to Gerald’s cucumber farm, where he showed us around and shared what he had grown. He generously sent us back to camp with some of his harvest to share, and enough for us to take home too.

There was something beautiful about experiencing the full journey of this relationship: the physical labour of climbing the hills to gather the guano, returning it to the soil, growing food, and then sharing the harvest with others.

It reminded us that ecological knowledge is not always found in books or laboratories. It is held in the everyday practices of people who know their landscapes intimately because their lives and livelihoods are woven into them.

For farmers like Gerald, the bats are not separate from the farm. They are part of the system that makes the farm possible.

Bat guano is naturally rich in nutrients including nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, making it a powerful organic fertiliser and an alternative to reliance on synthetic chemical fertilisers. More importantly, this practice reflects a way of working with what the landscape already provides rather than extracting from it without regard for the relationships that sustain it. by @inkayastudio

A little recap from our walkabout with @inkayastudio Big love to everyone who pulled up and made the day what it was.🫶🏾
More side quests loading….👀🆘 by @inkayastudio

Visiting hours for the IZINTU Exhibition over the next few days.

We have chosen to work with a booking system to ensure that a member of the team can be present during your visit, to welcome you into the exhibition and share more about the works and the ideas that have shaped IZINTU.

As the weeks unfold and we move towards the closing of the exhibition, we will be making more dates and visiting hours available.

Please use the link in our bio to book your slot.

📍 Stand 5022, Kabanga Road, Longacres, Lusaka
🗓️ 11–30 September 2026 by @inkayastudio

An IZINTU Exhibition portrait of @harrietlukiya wearing a special Sishemo Beads piece made by @hassan.yasini.1 during our Mulilo Workshop at @sishemobeads during the residency period in July.

This workshop was centred around the power of fire as a technology, one which has the ability to transform not only materials but also relationships between people. In many cultures across Zambezia, Mulilo is the place to unfold, to share stories, to listen to all that surrounds us, to alchemise.

At Sishemo, this became a space for making, remembering and being together. Glass, once discarded as waste, was transformed through heat and care into something to be worn, carried and cherished. The process reminded us that transformation is rarely only about the material itself. It is also about the hands that gather around it, the knowledge exchanged, and the relationships that are formed in the process.

This piece carries something of that fire with it.

IZINTU: Ancestral Currents is on view in Lusaka until 30 September 2026.

📍 Stand 5022, Kabanga Road, Longacres
🗓️ Visits are available through our booking calendar linked in our bio. by @inkayastudio

Mutemwa Mukelabai | Paramecium

As part of the IZINTU Exhibition, Bo Mutemwa presents Paramecium, a microscopic video installation that brings us into the intimate world of a pair of paramecia collected from a stream in his backyard and captured through the Ikasuwa Microscope. Paramecia are microscopic, single-celled freshwater organisms that move through water using thousands of tiny hair-like cilia. In the video, the pair can be seen moving through the water, retreating from light and seeking shelter amongst clusters of plant matter.

The work comes from a practice of close observation, asking us to pause long enough to notice the lives unfolding around us, including those that exist beyond the scale of our ordinary perception. In watching these tiny organisms respond to light, their environment and one another, we are reminded of the many forms of sensing, moving and belonging that make up the more-than-human world we are part of.

Paramecium invites us to consider what becomes visible when we pay closer attention to our more-than-human kin, and to the connections that exist between us, even at scales we rarely encounter.

IZINTU: Ancestral Currents
11–30 September 2026
Stand 5022 Kabanga Road, Longacres, Lusaka

🟤 Link in our bio to book your guided exhibition visit 🟤 by @inkayastudio

🟤 Opening night of IZINTU: Ancestral Currents.🟤

To everyone who came through, took time out of your day, braved Lusaka’s Friday traffic and gathered with us, Twalumba, Tatenda Zvikuru, Luitumezi Ahulu, Thank You.

For the curiosity, the questions, the conversations, the laughter. For remembering and returning. For sharing stories, making connections, recognising something familiar, or encountering something for the first time. In the IZINTU foreword, @banjichona writes about the need to reconstitute our relationships: to land, to each other, to memory, to language, to place and to more-than-human kin. There was something of that in the room on Friday.

People giving and receiving, kupa a kutambula. Attention given, stories shared, knowledge exchanged, memories stirred. The works became starting points for conversations that extended beyond the showcase, connecting us to places, people and ways of knowing that continue to live with us. Perhaps this is part of what it means to remember. Not simply to look backwards, but to return to relationships that have been interrupted, and to find ways of carrying them forward.

Kuyeya nku jokelela. To remember is to return. Thank you to all of the practitioners who shared their work, knowledge and processes with us, to the Inkaya team, our families and friends who helped carry this exhibition into being, and to our exhibition partners, Open Window University (@openwindowuniversity ), for making space for IZINTU.

And to everyone who came through, thank you for giving and receiving with us.

IZINTU: Ancestral Currents 11–30 September 2026
Stand 5022, Kabanga Road, Lusaka by @inkayastudio

We worked until the last minute, as is often the case with exhibitions. There were the usual moving parts, a few unexpected problems, a lot of running around, and plenty that had to be figured out along the way.

What made it possible was having good people around us.

From the practitioners and the Inkaya team, to family and friends who stepped in when things became difficult, people gave their time, resources, vehicles, tools, hands and energy to get the exhibition over the line.

A special thank you to Mwamba, Mama Mwamba, Aunty Gillian, Fergus, Daisy, Shimbi, Mwemba and Muko, who each stepped up when we needed extra support. It made a world of difference.

Putting together an exhibition is never quite as straightforward as it looks. But with people willing to pitch in when something needs doing, you find a way through.

And somehow, by the end of the day, it all came together.

IZINTU: Ancestral Currents
11–30 September 2026
Open Window University, Longacres, Lusaka by @inkayastudio

It’s an absolute joy to share IZINTU: Ancestral Currents, a group exhibition emerging from a programme of creative exchange between artists, artisans, farmers, community scientists, storytellers and knowledge holders across Zambia.

Exploring Buloongo, Meenda and Mulilo: clay, water and fire, the exhibition considers how ancestral knowledge continues to adapt and find new forms through creative ecological practice. The works emerge from encounters with place and material, drawing on shared processes of making, experimentation, learning and unlearning.

The showcase brings together practices that engage with clay, water, fire, found materials, natural fibres, recycled materials and other forms of material knowledge, reflecting on how what we inherit can shape how we make and imagine what comes next.

IZINTU: Ancestral Currents 11–30 September 2026 Stand 5022 Kabanga Road, Longacres, Lusaka
🟤Use the link in bio to book your guided exhibition visit

A note of gratitude to our exhibition partners @openwindowuniversity and our funders #UMIFund who have been integral in the coming together of this programme. by @inkayastudio