Decolonising Memory: Digital Bodies in Movement, is a UKRI-funded Citizen Science* project led by Cleo Lake, Kwesi Johnson and Jessica Moody. The project will research Bristol’s memory of transatlantic enslavement through historical and creative methodologies, and collaboratively design new performance-based memorial interventions centring African culture.
The project includes a series of monthly workshops starting in November 2021 and running through to summer 2022, culminating in dance-based memorials created by the project team which anyone will be able to view through an augmented reality app.
The project has three phases, though all three will work interdependently, feeding ideas and inspiration back and forth and into each other.
Phase One will identify and research ‘sites of memory’ in relation to Bristol and transatlantic enslavement through historical and creative research methods. These ‘sites of memory’, as identified by the project team will focus on places around the city which are associated with Bristol and enslavement. They might be connected to specific historical events, be created through a layering of stories over time, be existing memorial sites which commemorate this history, sites of resistance, antislavery and challenge historically and now or be contested places of debate and tension or which jar with us in the present day, for example through sites which celebrate enslavers, where the project will seek to intervene with new creative memorialization.
Phase Two responds to and develops this research through collaborative work drawing on practice-led creative interventions with a focus on dance and movement. This practice-led work will form both part of the research process into the deeper meaning of these sites and build towards the design of new memorial dance pieces, creating new performance-based memorials which draw on African diaspora dance culture to dialogue, counter and intervene in these sites. Project members will explore the significance of dance in relation to the history of enslavement, African-centred creative expression and dance as a medium of healing. In this way the project aims to collaboratively design a new folk dance for Bristol.
Phase Three brings this collaborative research together through the creation and sharing of memorial performances via an augmented reality app developed by Kwesi Johnson and The Cultural Assembly in collaboration with Digital Technologists, Michele Panegrossi and Luca Biada from FENYCE. The dance performances will be recorded against the sites identified and researched by project members and will be able to be viewed for free by anyone through a smartphone.
Through this collaborative research and intervention the project aims to
(1) find out more about how Bristol’s history and memory of enslavement, and its legacies connect to ‘place’
(2) use creative methods to reach deeper into this meaning and connect past and present
(3) build something positive together, for reflection, community and healing.
The project will create new collaboratively designed digital memorials which challenge, counter and dialogue with existing sites of memory in Bristol in ways which both acknowledge the truth of these sites and Bristol’s history of enslavement and also bring new narratives to these spaces, valuing different forms of knowledge and understanding and centring African culture, history and experience.
Read the full press release from the University of Bristol