African Pride to Bring “Humanare- The Future Is Plural” to Rio Innovation Week (12 Aug 2025)
African creative and cultural collective African Pride will represent an African voice at Rio Innovation Week 2025, bringing a new cultural-tech narrative to the festival’s Humanare stage on 12 August. Rio Innovation Week runs from 12–15 August at Pier Mauá and features a multi-track programme that explicitly blends ethics, culture and technology, a natural home for a project that marries Yoruba artistic heritage with futures thinking.
On the Humanare stage African Pride will present “Humanare – The Future Is Plural”, a live narrative and performance piece inspired by the legendary Ori Olokun and the celebrated naturalistic heads from Ife, masterpieces of Yoruba bronze and terracotta sculpture dating from roughly the 12th–15th centuries. The presentation aims to connect ancestral inventiveness with contemporary debates about technology, identity and plural futures. Organisers have promoted Humanare as a programme track that explores ethics, cultural agency and human-centred innovation at Rio Innovation Week.
Why the Ife heads matter and why they travel to a tech stage
The Ife heads (often referred to in museum literature as the Ori Olokun and related crown-heads) are widely recognised for their astonishing realism and technical sophistication. Objects from Ife altered modern assumptions about pre-colonial African craftsmanship and have been studied and displayed by major institutions such as the British Museum and specialist sites documenting West African art. By invoking Ori Olokun, African Pride places centuries-old artistic achievement at the centre of conversations about contemporary innovation and cultural reuse.
From bronze and terracotta to code and culture
Organisers and curators say Humanare is more than a museum reference: it is a creative framework for showing how ancestral knowledge systems and aesthetics can inform ethical design, inclusive AI, cultural tech startups and cross-continental collaboration. In Rio’s packed programme, which includes more than a dozen thematic tracks spanning climate, cities, wellness and Humanare , African Pride’s slot is a deliberate attempt to surface African historical genius as an active resource for 21st-century innovation.
What to expect and how to follow
Attendance at Rio Innovation Week is free and ticketed sessions run across several stages; Palco Humanare programming is listed in the festival schedule. Audiences should expect a mix of performance, short lectures, visual art references and moderated discussion that spotlights African artists, technologists and cultural entrepreneurs. Organisers and collaborators have shared promotional material on social platforms in the run-up to the opening week.
Why this matters for Interface Africa readers
African Pride’s Humanare presentation underscores a growing, strategic trend: Africa’s cultural heritage is being actively reframed as an engine for innovation, not only as a subject for museums. For creative industries, policymakers and tech investors across the continent, seeing Yorùbá artistry staged at one of the world’s largest innovation festivals is both symbolic and practical — a prompt to build cross-sector partnerships that respect provenance while harvesting cultural insight for human-centred technology.
Join the conversation
Interface Africa will cover the Humanare session and the broader Rio Innovation Week programme. Follow our live updates for clips, interviews and analysis connecting African heritage, tech policy and creative entrepreneurship.
