Client:

afrOURban in collaboration with Collective Futures

Supported by:

The Scanlon Foundation, The Australian Multicultural Foundation, RMIT Centre for Urban Research, Incubate Foundation

Location:

Naarm-Melbourne,

VIC, Australia

Date:

2022

Role: facilitator and designer

fundraising,

community engagement,

exhibition design and curation (in collaboration with Sandra Githinji Studio),

digital tool,

installation

identifying and engaging supporters, identification and coordination of project participants, facilitation of interviews, editing of stories, exhibition component design, coordination with host (No Vacancy, Testing Grounds, National Archives of Australia) coordination of installation, programming curation and coordination.

Victorian Multicultural Excellence award for community innovation

ArchiTeam innovation and contribution award

Context: For decades stories about people of African heritage living in this city have been written as narratives that perpetuate the tropes of nefarious ‘gang members’¹ and ‘extremely successful outliers’ . The danger of a single narrative is that it distorts the self-perception of people of African heritage. The Black Diasporas Naarm-Melbourne project shows more full expressions of the lives of African-Australian people through an exhibit and a digital map; http://www.blackdiasporas.com. The familiarity of the map of Melbourne connects the audience to the narrator, a very tangible way of “walking a mile in another’s shoes’’.

How: The project manifested as 456 stories, told by 42 storytellers about places, spaces and experiences that have meaning to people of Black-African diaspora heritage in Naarm-Melbourne. In addition to this 10 Black creatives translated those stories into 10 short films.

What: Black Diasporas Naarm Melbourne documents the experiences of individuals of African ancestry, living in this city, and the spaces and places that have meaning to them. Referencing oral narrative,² a common tradition throughout the African continent, in Black Diasporas Naarm Melbourne, we literally hear directly from people of African descent about their experiences. Life plays out in space and time manifesting in this project as a geolocated digital archive of interviews.

Through out the week the exhibition was at the No Vacancy events were held to discuss issues that came up during the gathering of the stories, these sessions highlighted questions around belonging, career development, and creative practice. The TV boxes designed for the exhibition then travelled to the National Archives of Australia, and Testing grounds, the films produced for the exhibition were also showcased at MPavilion.

Impact: This process provided the opportunity for more nuanced representations of the spectrum of experiences of the majority of the 50,000+³ people of African heritage living in this city. Black Diasporas shares life stories that encapsulate everything from the joys of giving birth, playing as a child, to the mundaneness of catching a tram or bus, to the tragedy of the effects of racial stereotyping, and the loss of life. The project is a manifestation of the contributions of 75 community members and creatives including filmmakers, interviewers and interviewees.