This project is a piece of afrofuturism that I am calling the Sankofa Seasons: Matter of Black Lives. This is a living document and will continue to grow and expand as I get clarity on the various pieces of the project. The is a project of my personal studio "Council of Fools" with help from colleagues and students that I work with through my game studio at DePaul University called the "DePaul Originals Game Studio."
The project began as an attempt to sit down with a friend and help capture some family stories and in the process of trying to figure out how to make them accessible and meaningful to the family at large, I collected them into a VR space. After sitting with the stories and watching the family and how they were affected by the experience, I thought this was a powerful healing opportunity and began thinking how I could do it for Black people in general. I had been also working with youth and using various tools extracted from my roleplaying game Ehdrighor, to get them to think about their stories and how they affect their experience and perceptions of the world. Finally I had been doing some community storytelling and talking about Black and Indigenous tales and the histories and medicines they carry for us. When I combined all of these ideas, Sankofa Seasons was born.
“Sankofa” is a word originating in Ghanaian Twi language. Translated, it encompasses the idea “Go back and get it.” The sankofa bird in the symbol above is a manifestation of that idea. The egg is the knowledge and wisdom of the past and it symbolizes the generations to come who will benefit from the wisdom of those who have come before them. It symbolizes the Akan people's ongoing quest for knowledge and wisdom, where we must keep moving forward while critically examining the past to find the tools to help us navigate into the new world.
This project is an attempt to capture some of that idea for us, the diaspora of Blackness, in America. There is so much wisdom around us in the day to day survival of our people that goes unsaid and unshared. The project wants to make that wisdom visible and experienceable and shareable. Herein is a collection of Black peoples stories of survival in different scopes and layers of White spaces.
It is an opportunity to discover survival through the lens of Black people. What it meant for us, what it means for us now, what it looked like, how we did it, and who were our allies. It is a record of survival from a Black lens as we work to remind people that change didn’t just happen with a handful of high profile people. There were numerous people on the ground and invisible to the popular media who were the actual deployers and people living in this struggle who effected and were affected by the policy changes that have come about. This is a safe space for Black people across all spectrums (age multigenerational, gender and gender presentation, sexual identity, skin tones, economic status, etc) to share their stories so that the young and old can have a direct interactive relationship with them. This project is small at the moment but I hope it will grow into a national experience so we can have so many stories and ways of experiencing our stories in direct contrast to the current environment in the US that has so many of us fighting against attempts to quiet us and move us back into Jim Crow policies.
This gathering of stories is less concerned with the stories of big names, and more concerned with the wisdom of day to day common people and the things they have done to create generational knowledge and wisdom that we can all grow from. Some of these stories are happy and wonderful, some are painful, some are shameful, some are angry, all are medicine for the tellers, one way or another, made their way to the other side. We want to name that medicine and let others bask in it in hopes that it will help them to find their way.
Sankofa Seasons is a meditative and explorative space in which to engage Black stories of existence, wellness, and survival. It is not a game inasmuch as it is an experience. One travels and explores the space, finding and listening to stories, and exploring the interelation experience that comes from interacting with the stories, their containers, and the environment.
Players find and gather story-pots which hold interviews with participants about their experiences of being Black in America. Once placed on a fire the pot reveals its story, and the player can freely roam the dreamy landscape while listening.
Sankofa Seasons is ultimately a work about world-building, listening, seeing and being seen. It is about celebrating the everyday struggles of Blackness and identifying the wisdom in medicine that each person carries.
This project leans into the idea of creating a play artifact that allows us to explore cultural stories, societal values and histories and their impact on us as individuals and as people. Professor Turner is conducting interviews with people across the diaspora of Blackness (including a wide range of ages, gender identities, body types, and skin tones), starting in Chicago but hoping to expand to people around the country. The intent is to make this experience freely available as a sort of “love letter to Black survival.”
Participant stories are contained in large pots called “Story-pots”. These are scattered across a dreamy, mystical landscape. The landscape is built to be an engaging meditative experience. Players are encouraged to explore and will invariably find pots. Every pot has a rhythm that can be heard softly from a distance. As the player gets closer to a pot the music coming from it gets louder. Once found, pots can be taken to the Ancestor’s Whispering Forge where they are placed, and the story can be release.
Placing the pot on the forge tells the player much about the story first and identifies any triggers the player should be aware of before they consent to listen. In addition to the stories, the pots are music experiences. Bringing pots together forms a jam. There are certain places where the player can place particular pots in a circle to reveal such things as ring-shouts and cyphers, rap, poetry, and spoke word, blues and jazz jams, and myriad other types of performances. The stories themselves are a sort of podcast interview with a participant and Prof. Turner, exploring various prompts. Listening to the story in proximity to a pot or pots, adds a musicality to the interview, turning every conversation into a sort of spoken word experience.
Players will explore the forest, below ground, into the waters, and into the sky to find stories, which upon being released, bring life into the environment.
