The world around us cannot change until we first imagine a better version of it. As a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaking duo, we see our practice as a motile commitment to a reparative and radical future. Through the intentional synthesis of film, sonics and physical installation, we look to create spaces where the work, and the conversations spawned from it, can be lived in, shared, incubated, interrogated and expanded upon.

Grounded in the works of Black cinema and the use of film as an expansion of oral history and archive, our practice is also a dedication to intimately observing the intersections between community, healing, creativity and our relationship with the natural and spiritual worlds.

At the heart of our practice lies a fundamental question: How can the screen become a space that fosters human connection and brings us together?

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
Our work is fundamentally concerned with the necessity of imagining new worlds. The worlds we are compelled to imagine are shaped by our engagement with black feminist thought, surrealism and the theories of writers like Edouard Glissant, Lola Olufemi, Robin DG Kelley, Octavia Butler and Pauline Oliveros. Reading the CIRCA 2024 Manifesto felt like reading something out of our notes. How do we become future ancestors? What role do we play in planting seeds for futures not yet dreamt of? What role do we play in shaping history and refusing to be passive subjects carried in its flow?

The 2m30 version of IWOYI that we’ve shared in our application is a meditation on the black radical imagination and how fundamental it is to the construction of alternative pathways down which we can travel. In line with CIRCA’s 2024 manifesto it is concerned with ruptures to the status quo, imaged through a descent beyond the event horizon of a black hole. In this realm, unbound by the rules of our universe, we find the potential of space that is shaped by rest, conscious and considered gathering, deep listening and movement unbound by the strictures of anti-blackness.

It is clear to us that we must move beyond what we currently know. We have to work fervently to untether ourselves from what we have been taught, instead banding together with other thinkers and artists to dream radical new realities into existence. Yves Klein’s leap into the void is akin to Glissant’s poetics of relation, Octavia Butler’s Earthseed, Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic and countless other artists’ deep incisions into what is necessary to shift the axis of this world. We are inspired to be a part of this legacy and feel that the CIRCA 2024 Manifesto is another feather in the arrow of this process.

The full version of iwoyi was originally commissioned by Dr. Aleema Gray for the British Library’s landmark exhibition, Beyond The Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music.

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
We are currently working toward a series of 5 installation works that dive into the potential of the black radical imagination as a conduit for dreaming the world otherwise. With the CIRCA Prize we would make the second iteration of this series, The Rasta and The Sadhu. In this work we are interested in exploring the entanglement of the roots of Rastafari with Hindu holy practices that were transported to Jamaica with indentured labourers from India. Through a consideration of this connection and its implications for cross-cultural resistance to colonial and imperial structures, we will develop a piece of speculative film that takes Africa and India as two nodes of resistance through which the possibilities of other worlds can be visioned. In following our mission statement, this work will be as much song as film, sculpture as screen, archive as story. The story of the connection between Sadhu holy men and the founding fathers of Rastafari tells us of the unlikely cultural rubs that are produced as a result of colonial rule. It also allows us to look at how these points of conversation have the capacity to produce new and powerful challenges to dominant power structures.

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