COMMUNITY NEWS
Decolonising Memory: Digital Bodies In Movement
written by Cleo Lake
Decolonising Memory: Digital Bodies in Movement is a Citizen Science project led by former Green Party Lord Mayor of Bristol Cleo Lake, Kwesi Johnson, Co-Founder and Creative Director of The Cultural Assembly, and Dr Jessica Moody, Senior Lecturer in Public History at the University of Bristol. A team has now been assembled through an open call to research Bristol’s memory of transatlantic enslavement through historical and creative methodologies. The team will collaboratively research and design a new performance-based memorial intervention centring African diaspora history and culture that will counter sites in Bristol connected to enslavement.
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.
8
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 diaspora culture, history and experience. The project began publicly in November with the first of a series of monthly ‘hybrid’ workshops taking place in person at the Malcolm X Centre and via zoom. The workshops will run 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.
