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Mitan-DAO Founding Cohort Intake Form

Nota: Pode utilizar as funcionalidades de tradução automática do seu computador/navegador ou o Google Tradutor para o ajudar a preencher este formulário. Se precisar de assistência para traduzir as perguntas, entre em contacto diretamente através do e-mail mitandaocollective@gmail.com.

ملاحظة: يمكنك استخدام ميزات الترجمة التلقائية على جهاز الكمبيوتر/المتصفح الخاص بك أو خدمة ترجمة جوجل لمساعدتك في ملء هذه الاستمارة. إذا كنت بحاجة إلى مساعدة في ترجمة الأسئلة، يرجى التواصل معنا مباشرة عبر البريد الإلكتروني: mitandaocollective@gmail.com

Note : Vous pouvez utiliser les fonctionnalités de traduction automatique de votre ordinateur/navigateur ou Google Traduction pour vous aider à remplir ce formulaire. Si vous avez besoin d'aide pour traduire les questions, n'hésitez pas à nous contacter directement à l'adresse mitandaocollective@gmail.com.

Section 1. Who you are.

Full name

Country where you are based

Organization or collective you work with (name, if any — leave blank if independent)

Describe your practice as best as you can.

Section 2. What Mitan-DAO is.

Mitandao is a pan-African network for artists, curators, researchers, and cultural workers. It takes its name from the Kiswahili word for networks and from the short form of decentralized autonomous networks.

Mitandao holds seven core commitments:

Epistemic justice. Colonial archives organized African knowledge into hierarchies that placed Western categories at the center and indigenous practices at the margins. Mitandao treats indigenous, vernacular, and grassroots knowledge systems as primary, not supplementary.

Living archives. Institutions treat archives as fixed collections they administer. Mitandao treats archives as systems communities activate, revise, and transmit. An archive is alive when the community it came from still shapes how it moves.

Distributed custodianship. No single institution owns cultural heritage. Mitandao distributes responsibility for cultural preservation across a network of practitioners who hold it collectively.

Horizontal governance. Mitandao has no executive and no headquarters. Members make decisions together in scheduled sessions. Leadership rotates based on project needs and expertise.

Temporal refusal. Colonial timelines impose linear progress narratives on cultures that understand time as cyclical, spiral, and multidirectional. Mitandao refuses those chronologies and lets communities define their own relationship to the past and future.

Community rootedness. Every project Mitandao undertakes begins in a specific community and returns its findings to that community. The network does not extract from communities to serve institutions.

Strategic opacity. Not every cultural practice needs to be legible to dominant institutions. Mitandao protects spaces of cultural work that resist full translation.

Mitandao operates through what the founding document calls a rhizomatic framework: knowledge moves horizontally, enters from multiple points, and belongs to everyone who participates in building it. No single node controls the whole.

The founding document is available here: [Link]

Section 3: Why you are here

Which of Mitandao's seven commitments do you work closest to, and what does that look like in your practice? (500 words max)

Where in your work have you treated an archive as a living system rather than a fixed collection — or pushed against institutions that refused to? (150 words max)

Section 4: What joining requires

Mitandao asks founding members to attend at least two structured sessions in the first six months. Can you commit to that? (Yes / No / Depends on timing — explain)

This cohort will revise the founding document. Do you accept that the document you read may not be the document Mitandao adopts? (Yes / No / I have conditions — explain)

Mitandao makes decisions through members present at scheduled sessions, with no executive to break ties. Does that structure work for how you operate? (Yes / No / I have suggestions and questions — explain)

Section 5: Logistics