As the year comes to an end, it is only natural to wonder what the future has got in store for us. Artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley & Josèfa Ntjam suggest their own visions of the future, while exploring the past, in a shared exhibition currently on at FACT in Liverpool, the local centre for art, film and the creative use of technology.
Brathwaite-Shirley and Ntjam's works combine reality and interactive digital environments to create alternative narratives; the artists often ponder in their practices about how acts of resistance, rebuilding and reimagining can lead to transformative new worlds.
Both work with a wide range of mediums: Brathwaite-Shirley is inspired by archives, maps and video games; artist, writer and performer Josèfa Ntjam favours sculpture, photomontage, film and sound, while her language integrates poetry with history and science.
The exhibition at FACT is the last instalment of "Radical Ancestry", a wider event that explored the sense of belonging.
Since February 2022, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley has worked with a group of young people from Liverpool self-titled "The Bandidos". Their collaboration started with three simple questions – how would you redesign Liverpool for your community? What does your world need? And, what rules does your world have? The result was "When Our Worlds Meet (2022)", a large -scale installation occupying one of the galleries at FACT.
Passing through a bus shelter displaying a set of terms and conditions, visitors emerge onto the remnants of a suburban street complete with lamp posts, buildings and public spaces hacked and transformed. Housed within the four zones in which the space is divided – imaginary architectures representing a pond, a living room, a playground and a derelict shopfront – there are chapters of an online video game created by Danielle and The Bandidos.
Players are encouraged to explore and learn in these alternative dimensions that reshape the rules and systems that frame our lives.
For The Bandidos, the game world represents all of us individually, and all of us as a group, and it is an opportunity to transform the city of Liverpool into four worlds. One is made from meat, and here dragons headline stadium gigs; then there's a utopian colony where queer feminists and communists can exist freely; a theme park where those who work the land are kept in poverty; and a series of portals found in dance clubs that allow visitors to travel between the past and the present to experience the journeys of enslaved people. The game and gallery encourage exploration and learning, while considering the possibility of reshaping the rules and systems that frame our lives.
Josèfa Ntjam’s immersive installation "When the moon dreamed of the ocean" (2022) is centered around the film "Dislocation" (2022) and re-examines history in the aftermath of colonialism and the Transatlantic slave trade. Presenting this work in Liverpool, a port city that prospered from the slave trade, is particularly relevant.
Ntjam's film is inspired by counter-cultural movements and non-Western histories that symbolise ideas of resistance, transformation and freedom. The installation references African water spirit Mami Wata, a figure of resistance and connection to their origins for those enslaved by the Transatlantic trade; the galactic mythic future of jazz composer Sun Ra; and the speculative underwater civilisations popularised by Detroit techno duo Drexcyia.
The film is surrounded by an underground cave filled with alien jellyfish, plankton and mushrooms. These natural life forms survive by communicating through systems and signals that they create amongst themselves: fungi form networks in the dense darkness of undergrowth; plankton collectively adapt over generations in response to environmental factors such as changing ocean currents.
These lifeforms are metaphors and represent carriers of memories that are too heavy for any single being to bear, but whose weight can be shared amongst the collective. These stories disperse with their hosts, and fragment with time and distance, growing into new forms and possibilities. By drawing parallels between natural processes and human experience, Ntjam offers new ways of navigating through the flows of the past, reminding us that spaces of solidarity, care and revolution can thrive in even the most inhospitable conditions.
Image credits for this post
1 – 4. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, When Our Worlds Meet (2022). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photo by Rob Battersby
5 – 7. Josèfa Ntjam, When the moon dreamed of the ocean (2022). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photo by Rob Battersby
8. Josèfa Ntjam, Dislocation (2022). Film still. Courtesy the artist and Nicoletti Contemporary
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