In my exhibition, "Ode (Owed) to Black WomXn," I constructed a participatory and immersive multimedia installation. This is a two-part immersive installation that takes you on a journey through an imagined Afrofuturistic world, with water being the medium of transportation for the audience. The installation draws parallels between an imagined Afrofuture our ancestors spoke of and the correlation to our present. The technologies and tools used provided an opportunity in expressing Blackness and Black WomXn's history in realms that reach beyond the physical. It is an homage to Black WomXnhood while critiquing the assumptions and presumptions. Using archival footage that centers on the conversation of the Black WomXn experiences, the piece includes interviews from Michele Wallace and Sonia Sanchez. In the second part of the installation, I continued to explore the histories and needs of Black WomXn in varying liberation movements through using Spoke by Mozilla with Occulus goggles.
Black FolX and Storytelling
In calling upon our past and invoking our ancestors, I strived to call on the nostalgic past that was not of the European lens. In Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture by Dr. Badia Ahad-Legardy, she speaks to many white Americans and Europeans’ early eighteenth-century belief that Black folX and their descendants could not experience nostalgia. This resulted in the narration of Black life and history through the lens of oppression and enslavement. It seems impossible to talk about the Black past without bringing into conversation trauma. The intricacy that Black past and memory is correlated with trauma translates to the association of memory with pain.
In molding a space that is safe for Black WomXn in Black art, it was essential for me to not include traumatizing imagery. As Black folX, we experience and are reminded of our trauma through our lived history and individual and collective experiences. In depicting a complicated and complex history, my task for myself was to take an active role in scoring archival footage that spoke to the nostalgia of Black WomXn, while honoring the pain experienced and bloodshed. So how do we, as Black folX, call upon the past when the past has been defined for us?
In an episode of “Left of Black,” Dr. Mark Anthony Neal speaks with Dr. Badia Ahad-Legardy on Afro-Nostalgia and Black Joy. During this conversation, Dr. Ahad-Legardy speaks to the definition of “nostalgia,” equating it to homesickness [15]. With this analogy, she expands that the terminology Afro-nostalgia refers to the constant fight to capture and reconstruct “home” that does not come from the memories of a Eurocentric narration of Black life. Our home affirms Blackness. Afro-nostalgia takes the form and active role of reclaiming and restoring our past, not revising the history, but acknowledging the expansiveness of Blackness that has not been confined by a system of oppression and racial trauma. Storytelling is one tool used by Black folX which enables the necessary tools to stretch beyond the timeline and connect to our ancestors, while also crafting that space.
Storytelling is Afro-nostalgia; it invokes home and familiarity. The power of storytelling involves a space that is familiar for Black folX and their descendants. In creating this space through art, this space is calling upon a home where our ancestors roam. This space consists of both the physical and metaphysical. The role that storytelling holds in the Black community can transport one through time and space. As a medium of transporting oneself through time to access these past memories, we see influences and sampling of ingredients from this home in Black art. My installation calls upon "home" where Black WomXn and our ancestors are free to commune and critique for growth. It is a place where the physical bridges with the virtual and metaphysical so that the past, present, and future can collide and exist as one. As Black folX, we are able to exist in all three simultaneously, and storytelling is one of the tools that allow us to do so. Storytelling is to Black folX is what water is to plants. Storytelling keeps us alive and connected to our ancestors. In combatting a history told through a European lens and honoring our past, storytelling preserves Black history and redistributes it to the community as another form of conservation and safeguarding.
Documentary's Role
Using archival footage serves to document at the earliest possible point that Black Womxn were creating with the future in mind. Documentaries serve the purpose of highlighting and "illuminating the human experience," as detailed by Patricia Finneran. –
Coordinate, organized, and strategic actions can facilitate major changes in a society's viewpoint, lexicons, values, and practices. Coherent actions can shift this post-viewing inspiration in action which can drive societal and legislative change, truly altering a societal practice. It has the ability to impact social change and social impact.
"Ode (Owed) to Black WomXn" uses documentary as one of its tools to communicate history and legacy that has been silenced. Displaying this history and heritage is preserving and drawing connections from the past to the present. The documentary is the tie to the past. Archival footage used in the documentary is one medium of storytelling.
Using the technology of archival footage, it's preserving a history that has been silenced. The archival footage exists, however, only in the virtual space. How do we bring the 2D space to a physical space to curate a safe space for other Black WomXn to explore a history that has been gaged and silenced?
Augment Reality in Storytelling
Augmented Reality (AR) "morphs the mundane, physical world into a colorful, visual one by projecting virtual pictures and characters through a phone's camera or video viewer" [16]. AR allows bridges the digital world to the physical world by overlaying on top 3D dimensions. The virtual world and the physical world can coexist while cutting the user off temporarily from the outside world. The user is thrust into an environment designed by the artist, and the AR experience is designed to have the user fully immersed in the curated space.
Using AR for storytelling allows for an expansiveness of art that is reflective of the subject. Rather than being confined, both the subject and the AR technology allow for the virtual space to exist in the physical. In reclaiming space and time, the AR technology used creates a physical space where the audience member can engage in this immersive landscape. They are thrust into the physicality of the space and immersed in the experimental form of storytelling. The active audience member "becomes part of an environment with an incentive to act and respond to the events they encounter" [17]. The installation uses the technology of AR to mold a space where Black WomXn were not heard while also paying homage.
Bridging Documentary and AR
In exploring the ideas of arts and ethics in curating spaces to elevate voices that have been suppressed, the result is a reclamation of time and space from systems that have exploited and benefited from the labor of Black WomXn. Using art and technology to ethically construct spaces in which Black WomXn have historically been silenced physically translated to an immersive installation. The installation was a safe space that was constructed through the use of archival footage and AR technologies. The responsibility of curating safe spaces is assisted with the interweaving of documentary and AR technologies. To curate a safe space using a combination of these two tools is to use the relationship of both and prioritize the intended audience's emotional, physical, and emotional well-being. The directed audience is Black WomXn. The documentary helped bring in the actuality of the past. The AR technology assisted with the storytelling in calling the present moment. The combination of the two calls on the emotion of the audience and calls upon Afro-nostalgia and memory. The intersection of expressing Blackness through digital technologies and humanities crafts space that is virtual and physical, allowing Blackness and Black WomXn to consume as much space as possible without scrutiny and ramifications.
In understanding the intersections of the African diaspora and digital storytelling, The Digital Black Atlantic is one example that showcases digital tools and technologies enabling a better understanding of the Black diaspora. The essays included ranges in professions and academic fields that all address similar questions of how to better and proactively protect the memory and history of the Black experience across the Atlantic, with digital tools informing and better understanding Blackness.
The use of digital technologies in the spaces of expressing Blackness allows for an interdisciplinary exchange of memory and preservation. The use of digital technology in spaces of Blackness has the potential to “liberate the archives and make manifest memory that is otherwise stored as inert material for limited scholarly use” [18]. With limited documentation of the Black experience that is not from the oppressor's eyes and voice, these digital tools prove fundamental in manifesting physically a history that has been silenced and overlooked. Black folX carry the histories and memories of the diaspora stolen from ancestral land, forced to transverse the Atlantic ocean, and enslaved in the Americas and Caribbean. Black folX innately carry this history and its brutality of it. However, this history is whitewashed in academia, with a disconnected archive.
In trying to access history, we have to be wary of the influences of white culture in the retelling. Thus the significance of Black storytelling is imperative in us gatekeeping our culture, but more specifically gatekeeping for the protection of Black folX.
Our narratives have been whitewashed and have eliminated the narratives of trans Black WomXn, womXn of the frontlines, and womXn that have contributed with the Afrofuture in mind subconsciously. Digital tools such as music production, gaming, and digital humanities open the window for these memories to be recorded and showcased to illustrate a narrative that has been suppressed. We are reclaiming our past and using digital tools to craft and narrate a future from our lens. A lens that is cognizant of Black trauma and pain. A lens told from the ancestors and their descendants. A lens that will be used to preserve and document for future generations.
Influence of Blackness in the Digital Space
Beyond the use of preservation, the use of digital tools in overall Black spaces illustrates and highlights the influence Black culture has on social media spaces and social culture. The digital creations by those within the Black diaspora in social media spaces, such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and SoundCloud to name a few, take on a form of mash-ups and remembrance. Engraved within our DNA, Black folX samples each other and our history. In the process of “rememor[izing]” through which we construct a route to historical truth, we sample our histories in our movement, speech, behaviors [19]. Social media spaces feature a “rememory” and overall digital culture and trends sample Blackness. Black culture has influences in the digital sphere, yet we are discounted and overshadowed in recognition. Black WomXn start trends in which white audiences then appropriate.
These social and digital platforms take on a role of a digital tool that documents the influence Black culture has on digital creations and trends. We are able to trace through the sampling and “rememory” of these digital creations by Black folX, which allows us to see Black humanity that was refused, denied, and unrecognized. These digital creations serve as a document for themselves the vastness of Blackness, as well as allow us the space to “rememoerize” our past. Digital Blackness and Black digitality allow for us to create spaces that have to potential of “enacting Black subjectivities, of refiguring the relationship to nation, and of articulating new forms of diasporic identities and relationships” [19]. Black digital creations break free from their fixed forms of the digital space because of the histories and archive that is naturally incorporated in Blackness existing in the digital sphere. These digital recordings serve as material memory and are an archive as themselves.
The problem then becomes so where then is a safe space for distribution of Blackness in the digital sphere for Black consumpion? Where can we safely document our lives without culture vultures stealing Black WomXn and Black folX creation and then gaslit? Where can we create without suffering the weight of capitalism and forced production to stay alive? This installation was an introduction in answering that question, but not a definitive answer. This installation is a space for the documentation, creation, and “rememerizing” with only Black WomXn in mind.
[15] (2021, Badia, A.-L.)
[16] (n.d. Tulane University)
17] (2018, Craig and Georgieva)
[18] (Alkalimat, 2021)
[19] (Donaldson, 2021)
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