African Digital ArtFak'ugesi Curators
Online Exhibition
Always On
Free
'Time, the Earth, and Death are Living Things, as Stories are' curated by Elisabeth Efua Sutherland, is a co-created digital storytelling exhibition which maps old and new stories of individuals from the North, South, East & West of the continent into a rich, interactive platform that allows us to come to a new, collective understanding of what it means to be African in the digital age.
"In many cultures across Africa - but particularly in the Akan tradition from which I come - there is a tradition of storytelling as a way to suture the body into time’s order, and thus to make sense of the tangible and intangible aspects of our lives as spiritual beings interfacing with a physical world. There was an understanding of the shifts between the tripartite worlds of the living, dead, and unborn, and there were customary rites and events to mark the passages between these phases. As we become more and more oriented to the material world via forces of capitalism and globalisation, we find ourselves less and less in tune with this matrix, and ironically find ourselves less and less in tune with our bodies, our spirits, and our minds - as individuals, and as the collective whole. How can we inhabit ourselves more fully in digital and virtual space, which in many senses, is currently out of time’s order? Alice Kane believed that stories could mend broken hearts and broken worlds. If humans participate as storytellers and observers of narrative (a la Walter Fisher), and our planet is full of ‘connected-but-disconnected’, ‘not-as-connected’, and ‘broken’ people, perhaps new tellings of old and new stories could fix those too, by helping us to participate and observe in ways we have forgotten about, and connecting us back to a deeper awareness of what it means to be human."
LINKED LIVE EVENT: '#timeearthdeath: A Live Event', 28 October, 19:00, see "Online Performance" listing for more.
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