Camille-Louise Kouba Mbayo
Project: Board Game Events
Is hosting a series of cooperative board game events across Bed-Stuy—in beloved community spaces like Brooklyn Tea, Cumbe Center for Dance, Free Black Women’s Library, Herbert Von King Park, and even my own rooftop. These playful gatherings are part of a larger intergenerational Afrofuturistic engineering education experience, set in reimagined African kingdoms of the 1400s, such as Benin City and the Kingdom of Kongo. The broader project, which has received partial support from More Art, Culture Push, and recently the Brooklyn Arts Council (although they haven’t made the official announcement), blends storytelling and engineering through five activation/workshops:
- Structures and home building
- Water filtration
- Electricity and Play-Doh
- Make your drum and other sound sculptures
- Renewable energy learning center.
From these workshops, participants will create a storybook. Inspired by that storybook, the cooperative board game —where The Laundromat Project comes in—will explore engineering concepts through a lens of play, history, and Black imagination. The game mechanics and design will be co-created with the community as a love offering between Bed-Stuy and me.
This project directly responds to the inaccessibility of many STEM opportunities in Black communities. It aims to make tech learning joyful, culturally rooted, and community-centered—blurring the lines between art, education, and liberation.
Bio:
Cam K Mbayo (she, they, we) is a multidisciplinary, ever-evolving engineer-artist working at the intersection of art, tech, culture, and education. A queer Congolese-born, Brooklyn-based earthling, Cam arrived in Bed-Stuy to pursue their third engineering degree—an M.S. in Computer Science—and found the universe. Since Cam has been scheming with the universe, reaching back to ancestral practices and technologies. An avid reader, an abolitionist, a napper, a love evangelist, a pan-African rebel, Cam believes in building new worlds rooted in right relationships, love, and abundance. In the pursuit of wonder, they are creating experiences with the guiding principle of “your gift is your responsibility.” With three engineering degrees, Cam is committed to demystifying engineering and equipping people with the tools to navigate technological landscapes. In between naps, Cam is committed to living fully in the present moment and believes there is an artistry in that. They can be found in trees, on wheels, reading, dancing, meditating, adventuring, painting, talking about colonialism and land liberation, playing games, and loving and laughing with the community.