☾ dive into the lore
Half city girl. Half Southern gal.
Afrofuturism is old records and red clay. Afrofuturism is fried fish with spaghetti, hot sauce, and sweet tea. Afrofuturism is end of week rest, and your Sunday best.
It’s the juke joint and the sous sous.
It’s the Dirty South and the ring shout.
It’s “yes, ma’am” and “bless your heart“.
Kongo Square Studio was founded by Kayla Jordan Love, a wandering griotte, interfaith spiritualist, and design researcher.
Raised in a blended Malawian, European, and Black American family, her practice prioritizes data conjure, speculative design, and Indigenous methodologies.
She’s midwifing a future where technology honors tradition, and evolves in natural rhythm with the Earth’s primordial cycles.
“La sangre llama a la sangre.”
Blood calls to blood. Who’s calling you?
Love always felt a deep longing for magic and meaning, craving jazz and channeling poetry, and soaking up music, movement, and mythmaking. Three years learning and dancing on an archipelago strengthened her kinship to the global African collective.
She consulted in the tech industry, read Butler, Hughes, and Hurston… and kept dreaming of a world where Black folks can move freely. Living in the barrios of Borikén deepened Love’s calling and she wandered even further on pilgrimage.
Currently writing near the seaside in Sri Lanka, she has been traveling the world since 2021. Today, she is in the process of applying for dual citizenship in West Africa, planning to bring her experience and expertise home to the Motherland.
Meet us at the Crossroads.
After kissing the Caribbean farewell and embarking for Asia in 2024, Love launched the studio’s inaugural product while in Thailand in 2025. The Green Book was a survival guide for Black folks navigating road trips during Jim Crow.
Today, you are navigating the world and seeking freedom, but haven’t been gifted new maps. We’ve designed your compass. Blend pilgrimage journaling with Black autoethnography: The Emerald Book
Includes three full years of journaling prompts.
“Afrofuturism is a little boy with a transistor heart. The surgeons said he wouldn’t survive past 10. His aunties bathed him in river water and coded prayers into his bloodstream using Morse-tapped shea butter.
At 15, he built a pirate radio station in his closet. It only plays at midnight, and only in dreams. Refugees, oracles, and runaways across the world hear it—a station of lullabies, African oral history, and the sound of Black mamas fixing dinner.
When he dies at 113, the machines mourn.”
Kongo Square Studio began to share Afrofuturist storytelling in 2025, and soon folks were requesting books, films, and comics. Those beloved jazz fables crystallized into Crossing the Jordan, a micro fiction collection inspired by Black diaspora diversity.
“I never truly understood Author’s Voice until I came across [Kayla’s storytelling]. I woke up this morning with a rhythm in my head, and I knew it to be from her. The words were not there, because they are her words and stories to tell, not mine to invent, but I felt the music. Her writing is jazz that moves the spirit.” Jilian Mathews
“Noukoukou vodun nougbede vodun.”
What is dead is not dead. (Fon, Benin)
The stories came first, and demand transformed them into books. Refusing to route ancestral narratives and liberatory texts through mainstream algorithmic monopolies, Love listened carefully to her Ori and chose the path less traveled.
Kongo Square Studio has begun the work of establishing an independent publishing house, designed to bridge the gap between literacy initiatives and cultural heritage preservation.
By leveraging our proprietary griotte infrastructure, the press will function as both an Afrofluxus printing laboratory and a decentralized, Pan-African underground library.
Afrofuturism is the call and response.
Love’s pilgrimage was the foundational soil for Kodex Noire, a decentralized sanctuary and community resource for those called to the design and development of griotte infrastructure. Intended to serve creatives of color, dreamers in diaspora, and Pan-African practitioners, we weave together decolonial methodologies, speculative design, and ancestral technologies. It’s a living compass meant to be activated through STEAM workshops, hackathons, and literary salons.
Gathered within this ever-evolving gourd, we code outside the machine: charting modern constellations with Grix-Grix, a serverless, Wi-Fi-free prototype for decentralized databases; tracing Conception de Ménageries Noires, an Afrofuturist cosmology proving AI is ancient and African; and mapping Pilira Nomadinx, the design documentation for a sovereign, matriarchal ecosystem.
Named for Congo Square in New Orleans, Louisiana, Kongo Square Studio honors Voodoo Queen Madame Marie Laveau and strives to carry on her legacy of African marketplace ritual: here, stories are traded and shared, sparking change across generations.