How do we write ourselves into history that elides and invents its versions? How do socially marginalized groups perform historiography from what’s hidden in plain sight? In turn, how do we harness digital arts to create immersive experiences that problematize ethno-cultural nationalistic texts? What methodologies are employed to rewrite women into independence mythmaking through folklore and history? How does a transmedia and multi-platform approach illuminate different perspectives of histories?
These are some of the questions at the centre of the development of The Ground Screams To Whisper, an Afro-gothic transmedia and multi-platform project through which the audiences experience the triumph of being an everyday female freedom fighter and re-live their often-erased stories that have shaped Kenya’s independence struggle. Set on a coffee plantation and drawing from Eastern and Southern African cosmologies, with visual aesthetics inspired by Afro-gothic motifs, which merged our world of the living with that of our ancestors, The Ground Screams To Whisper explores the healing of our lineages and embracing freedom.
This project, exists as a one-user VR game, mobile puzzle games, AR-enabled graphic novel, and a 6 D.O.F (Degrees of Freedom) location-based experience to create a participatory immersive exhibition, where multiple viewers of a user’s exploration and game-play are part of the experience. Each digital experience is an entry point to different perspectives, stories, and histories: creating diverse iterations of the foundational story and themes.
In telling the development of the story and game-play, this presentation explores the stories that we don’t get to tell, the necessary excavations needed and the collaborations to make those possible, the colonization of the independence struggle, and the inextricable link between coffee production, forced female labour, and the wealth of the British Empire.
The theoretical foundations for this project are steeped in global South radical feminist politics, critical cultural studies, and critical approaches to communications and media studies. In the end, The Ground Screams To Whisper: A Constellation of Experiences contemplates the notions of decoloniality across story and technology, multiple African feminist cultural text-making, historical excavations and archive-making, the ecologies available for collaboration processes of development and production of digital humanities, and the systems in place for non-sustainable NGO funding on the African continent and their link to continued cultural and media imperialism.
On the 23rd of January, 2024, Nairobi Digital Humanities is holding a roundtable to discuss the Ground Screams to Whisper.
At the helm of the conversation will be Nyambura M. Waruingi, a cultural activist, writer, producer, and curator at the confluence of art, culture, and immersive technology.
She experiments with radical ways to imagine new worlds through filmmaking, immersive storytelling, and gaming, in turn producing visionary projects in Canada, Kenya, South Africa, Rwanda, USA, UK, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Nigeria.
