Art / Rising Arts Agency
New art piece is an ode to ‘Blackness, Muslimness, and transient Somaliness’
A new interactive experience shows people archiving their stories on their owns terms and explores themes of hypervisibility, invisibility and surveillance.
A radical ode to “Blackness, Muslimness, and transient Somaliness”, Before We Disappear has been created by 22-year-old Asmaa Jama, a Bristol creator who is part of Rising Arts.
The 20-minute-long piece uses poetry, film, audio, creative coding and storytelling and has been created to explore othering and identity, and how this leads to a lack of historical record.
is needed now More than ever
The interactive film was written and produced by Jama with collaborators in Addis Ababa in Ethiopa.
Viewers follow the figure of an archivist through moving image film, with text guiding through the narrative.
The piece asks them to interrogate the ways they have been seen, made invisible and watched.
“This experience explores Black futurity, the undead, and reanimating and embodying the archive. It is a piece that centres communities on the margins,” says Jama, who also co-founded Dhaqan Collective, a feminist art group that works with Somali elders and young people.
“For them, it hopes to serve as an archive and a kind of care and protection. For others, it aims to create a moment to interrogate the ways they move through the world.
“I’m looking forward to developing this piece into a film in the future, in particular experimenting with how sound and glitching can be used.”
Before We Disappear is released on Friday, March 26. Photo: Asmaa Jama
Jama worked with costume designer Gouled Ahmed to create intricate costumes based on the horn of Africa and with Gebriel Balcha to create an original soundscape layered with Somali music discovered in colonial archives.
Before We Disappear will feature as part of the BBC New Creatives and Jama also hopes for it to be a piece that encourages viewers to tell their own stories.
Inspired by the Sufi Somali protection rituals of their relatives, the archive will be a space to crowdsource protection spells and alternate methods of care, like songs, remedies and recipes.
“With society re-evaluating how we tell stories and record histories, as well as how we interact online, Before We Disappear feels timely and necessary,” says Roseanna Dias, Jama’s project mentor.
“It offers a powerful exploration of what it means to take care of ourselves, our stories, and each other, in physical and digital spaces, and in our own bodies.
“Threading together many art forms, Asmaa has created an immersive interactive experience that we’re sure will resonate with many people in Bristol and beyond.”
Main photo: Asmaa Jama
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