The Instrument Makers Lab returns for its second edition with a clear and urgent question at its core: who gets to make music, and under what conditions? In 2026, the Lab turns its focus to accessibility, treating it not as a technical fix but as a creative position, one that reshapes how instruments are imagined, built, and played.
Set across two weeks (16th - 27th February) within the wider Kilele Symposium, the Lab operates as a concentrated space for shared learning and experimentation. It brings together artists, musicians, and creative technologists to explore new ways of producing sound through dialogue, demonstration, and hands-on making. The emphasis is on confidence as much as competence, on giving participants the tools to trust their instincts while working across unfamiliar systems.
Hosted at the Black Rhino Offices (The Mall - Basement), the Lab temporarily transforms the site into an active workshop: tables strewn with cables and components, laptops humming alongside soldering irons, ideas circulating freely between bodies in motion. Under the guidance of experienced practitioners, participants move between electronics, digital environments and hybrid approaches to instrument design, continually asking how tools can be adapted to different bodies, abilities and modes of expression.
The Lab functions as an artist-led environment rather than a classroom. Learning happens through doing, through collaboration and through failure as much as success. Programming and electronics are introduced through guided sessions led by invited facilitators, including returning collaborators from BELA and other partners. Code-alongs, soldering workshops, and group prototyping sessions form the backbone of the programme, encouraging participants to build instruments that sit somewhere between the practical and the speculative.
Across the two weeks, the programme moves from grounding to emergence. Early sessions focus on core ideas around accessibility in instrument design, alongside foundational work in analog circuitry and digital sound tools such as Ableton, Max for Live, and HISE. As the Lab progresses, attention shifts toward hybrid builds and collaborative development, supported by mentorship sessions with artists working across sound, performance, and technology.
The Instrument Makers Lab is open to participants at all stages of practice. No prior technical knowledge is required, only curiosity, patience and a willingness to listen closely. In keeping with this year’s focus, the Lab actively welcomes participants from underrepresented communities and those interested in inclusive approaches to making and performing with sound.
Beyond the two-week gathering, the Lab is conceived as a seedbed rather than a standalone event. It aims to equip participants with transferable skills in instrument-building and creative programming, to foster lasting connections between artists and technologists and to support the circulation of newly developed instruments within local and international contexts. The Lab also opens pathways toward future workshops, performances and extended development of the tools created within it.
The Instrument Makers Lab 2026 is organised by Kimina (Santuri East Africa Team), Adam Yawe and Bernt Isak (Kilele Team), with the support of instrument designer and reseacher Astrid Bin and volunteers Flower, nNje, and Tyresse. The Lab is shaped as much by its participants as its facilitators, and it is through this shared authorship that it continues to imagine a more open, responsive future for musical creation.
The lab will be open 16th - 20th and 23rd - 27th between 11AM and 5PM
Instrument Makers Lab in the Kilele 2026 program: Instrument Makers Lab Presentations, Instrument Makers Lab
Artist profiles: Adam Yawe, Kimina For Me Please, Astrid Bin, Mxshi Mo
