LEGACY
AN AUDIO VISUAL EXPERIENCE IN THREE PARTS
Legacy" is an audio-visual experience exploring how culture passes through time via stories and material inheritance—the unity of narratives and artifacts that shape our heritage: land linked to a family name, a wooden doll embodying a tradition, a story connected to a body. This concept unfolds through three pieces: "Mwana Hiti: A Child Made of Wood," examining how societal changes impact the Mwana Hiti doll tradition among coastal tribes; "Testimony,"highlighting storytelling's power to heal and disrupt our relationship with space and time; and "Ardhi," viewing land as a connection across generations, prompting reflection on our bonds with ancestors and descendants. Together, these works reveal that while stories and objects may seem separate, their unity gives depth and meaning to our legacy.
MWANA HITI
A CHILD MADE OF WOOD
__________
As part of Legacy, PichaTime collaborated with Balcony Series to realize one key strand of that speaks of legacy as associated with living tradition. Mwanahiti is the rite of passage for young girls entering womanhood amongs the coastal tribes of Zaramo, Kwere, Doe. key to this practice is a doll made of wood, Mwana Hiti--with varying names amongst tribe: Mwana Nyankiti, Nyakiti.
What the use of the doll? Can the practice be what it is without the doll that caries the name of the tradition?
THE CONCEPT
Most of the societal context within which the tradition was practice has evolve: today at the age where a girl would be required to start the process of being part of this practice, girls are in schools; the movement of people, education, the media, and a host of ways in which the society has changed the way it spend its time has created a condition in which the tradition can not be what it used to be.
These questions, are of especially special interest to Balcony Series founder Haikaeli Gilliard. In fact, as a curator and especially as a farmarcist by proffessinal, she is deeply interested in the questions at the intersection of Art and Health. It is this interest that led her to partner with Nicholas Calvin M., an artist, a filmmaker, and a founder of PichaTime, to realize a short film that invited a few key people to reflect on this the topic of Mwanahiti in the context of thinking about Legacy.
The resulting film, 'Mwana Hiti: A Child Made of Wood ' is a short reflection on the tradition that keeps on evolving. At it's core it is an invitation for those interested in the topic of change and leagacy to come and share their ideas about the topic. The film was screened as part of the PichaTime annual event, Legacy, that took place at AjabuAjabu Audio Visual House Decemebr 18th 2021.
Legacy, as a final event of the year for PichaTime, call it a summit if you will, was in keeping with our tradion of opening up the stage to multiple voices to give feedback about the films, and to engage on the interesting discussion pertainig to the the question of Legacy: which was the focal point of the three audio visual presentation that night.
Here is the snippets of ideas and conversation about the topic of Legacy.
The Film
________
TESTIMONY
____________________
At it's heart this piece is about the
"capacity of stories and storytelling
to both heal and fragment our
relationship with space and time."
TESTIMONY
This is a site specific act of story telling serves to counter an over and covert repression of emotion in the formulation of knowledge. The story – as experienced here collectively – seeks to explore to the susceptibility of reality to intentional, concerted acts of rehabilitation. And the dual capacity of stories and storytelling to both heal and fragment our relationship with space and time. By consciously venturing into the what is beyond the physical and the chronological, our horizon of what is possible, what is probable, what is real duly expand -- and within that expanse lies role of the subject within truth.
RECORDING OF
TESTIMONY
AUDIO PIECE
The recording of the Testimony piece took place at AjabuAjabu Audio Visual Studio.
ARDHI
The film takes the land not just as a functional place to live or farm, but instead as the material connection between people across time. As a place to bury the dead, a place to mourn, a place to leave a trace of yourself behind to be remembered, a place to keep a family united, land speaks to our exhibition’s theme of legacy and inheritance in multiple ways. Through an aesthetic that deemphasizes individual people, and instead focuses on the built environment and the labor that creates it, this film invites viewers to reflect on their own relationships with others through the material world. How do we make lasting connections with our ancestors and descendants that extend beyond the boundaries of birth and death? In what ways are our homes more than brick and cement, but rather the foundations for relationships with people who we may have never met? Ardhi aims to open up a visual and sonic conversation with the land we live on, taking the words of a single family as a provocation for thinking of urithi as a material relationship that is situated in place.
Ardhi takes place around the land of a single family from Rombo, in Moshi, near the Kenyan border. Through clips of recorded conversations with different members from this single family, overlayed with video footage from building a house on inherited family land, the experimental and ethnographic film asks us to consider what it means to relate across multiple generations.
__________________________
THE TEAM
Contributors
Haikaeli Gilliard
Jesse Gerard
Rebekah Ciribassi
Sophia George Mrema
Sound Engineer
Victor John
Audio Diary
Aika Kirei
Voice Acting
Nasma Mzee
Curated by
Nicholas Calvin M.
Special Thanks
Ajabu Ajabu Audio Visual House
Nafasi Art Space
Swiss Embassy Tanzania
PROJECTS
THE ART OF THE LETTER
The session brings together artists, writers, and other creatives to reflect on letter-writing, stamps (and the art they showcase), and modes of communication and story-keeping that are perhaps fading away in today's busy, electronic world.
POETRY AND JAZZ
In Tanzania, poetry has been sung as much as written, and jazz has given musicians license to experiment with new sounds as much as reach back to the sonic past.
KHANGA INHERITENCE
Over the past century, khanga has evolved into a central fabric in the lives of East Africans, carrying memories and stories of their social, political, and economic experiences. Emerging in the mid-19th century, its existence is linked to interactions between the East African coast and the wider world via the Indian Ocean—interactions that predate colonial occupation and trace back through maritime trade.