8 minute read
Xabiso Vili & Sonwabo Valashiya
RE/MEMBER YOUR DESCENDANTS.
Award-winning performer, writer, new media artist, social activist, and most importantly, multiple poetry slam champion winner, Xabiso Vili, who through his writing explores his inner world in relation with that of his exterior, collaborates with none other than the aliased, Blackvillage Kid, Sonwabo Valashiya a Joburg based, South African digital illustrator and graphic designer whose illustration style emanates from African aesthetics and diversities.
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Together, Xabiso and Sonwabo join the Fak’ugesi Festival to showcase their spiritual realism illustrations infused with poetry, and folklore telling in Re/Member your Descendants, known for its inquiry of “What will we become Ancestors of?”.
Q
Please give us a brief intro of who you are, and the role that you’ll be playing at this year’s Fak’ugesi festival.
[Xabiso] I am Xabiso Vili, a writer, performer, a thinker, and a producer around stories and magic, focusing on their interaction with our reality. I’m also one of the creators of Remember Your Descendants, an exhibit at Fak’ugesi. It is an augmented reality project that combines illustration with poetry and music to ask the question: “If you were an ancestor, what would your descendants call upon you for?”
[Sonwabo] I am a creative with a background in Graphic Design, an Illustrator at heart with a style that focuses on African aesthetics and the beauty of our people, cultures, diversity and our storytelling. So, it was a good idea for me and Xabiso to collaborate on the project- Re/Member your Descendants- that is showing at Fak’ugesi this year. It’s been quite a journey and a good collaborative effort.
Q
Xabiso, as an author, what impact does the festival have on your career and the overall global perspective?
I think that it’s always important for writers to explore new forms of storytelling. The world is growing and developing, and as much as we love putting together a good read, we need to think creatively about how to engage readers. Through this project with Fak’ugesi and a global interaction, I’m very excited to see how we’re going to use new technologies to pull in new readers and tell stories in a new way. I’ve been very excited about the project we’ve been working on and others that I’ve seen on the line-up for the festival.
Q
Sonwabo as a graphic designer illustrator, what impact does the festival have on your career and global perspective?
I think for the fact that for this project, we were able to exhibit it in pairs, it had quite a big impact on my career. It was sort of an exposure of my work to a global audience, and I believe that that was just the tip of the iceberg because there are still so many ideas that we have for this project, and also just looking at different ways we can preserve our cultures and our stories in very innovative ways
Q
How do you guys explore the notion of building by using immersive media for yourselves and the broader community?
[Sonwabo] I think in our field of storytelling we’re building for the next generation, the descendants. We find ways of preserving that culture and our way of being, thus building a community that really knows themselves, our history, culture and traditions. So, I think with immersive media, using specifically augmented reality or extended reality itself to explore these ways where we can actually build a community that is innovative, that is also equipped with new technologies, and that’s what we’re building, that’s where we want to see our community.
[Xabiso] It’s also centred around the power of imagination and creating a new world because that alone plays such an important role in the work. I think we use this art as a space from which we can start imagining ourselves as these spiritual beings, but also, with Remember your Descendants, it’s not just to remember those who come ahead of you, but to put them together. It is by putting ourselves together and imagining ourselves that we’re able to put together the future.
Q
What are your thoughts on the impact of this festival on how you can level up in your sector?
[Xabiso] I mean, first of all, I think we’re very lucky and blessed that we can finally have a South African launch for the work. Paris was really exciting, a different type of experience, but for me it’s been different seeing how the work is interacting with people back home, because people recognise these images. Little things like standing outside and getting the images of how people come up and say, “yo, this is our culture!”. It’s important to be represented. It’s been really exciting seeing that work and that shift, and like Sonwabo was saying earlier on, there are a lot of branches that we’re starting to see and
imagine, of how our work can grow and move, and what type of projects can springboard from it. I think for us, this was our first attempt at augmented reality, our first full project and now that we’re starting to understand it better and explore it, we get a better feeling of how best we can use it and tell stories through technology.
[Sonwabo] I think we are also trying to move ourselves in this immersive new media, building towards that and trying to get funding for these projects that might be big ideas and really need the capital, so what could really be helpful is to get sponsors and partners that can help us build.
Q
Please briefly unpack the entrepreneurial front of immersive media in the African context?
[Xabiso] This comes down to that conversation of access, which is such an important one, and I think that’s why Sonwabo and I were very excited to use augmented reality, in particular, because phones are more readily accessible. But, if we’re looking at immersive media as a whole it ranges. For instance, if you look at virtual reality, an entry set is like R3000.00, then something like projection mapping which goes into the hundreds of 1000s, maybe even Millions to just have the equipment, before you even start talking about the hundreds of 1000s you need to split up something like a five minutes animation. I mean, even with VR films, which are quite similar in pricing, you need hundreds of 1000s to record. Sonwabo and I and the team at Re/Member your Descendants had a very, very tiny budget, and we did what we could with it, and we’re still trying to figure out what else to do, and how to build sustainability. So yes, it is, and there needs to be greater work in getting it to be more accessible and with accessibility, comes the responsibility of making people aware of this technology and this art. The more people use it, the more affordable it can become.
Q
Xabiso, what are you looking forward to achieving through this year’s festival, using your love for storytelling, more specifically on telling folk tales?
This is already exciting because it all kind of started as this springboard of finding new ways of telling old and new stories. But I think my mind has kind of been opened up in terms of the direction that Re/Member your Descendants can take. There are a lot of possibilities of getting Re/Member your Descendants, the work, moving through South Africa, something that has started already. I am also excited to see, explore, and listen to other panels throughout the festival, just to see how and where the storytelling and the poetry can mix and merge, and how it can grow. I’m excited to see how we go about building these stories together.
Q
What are you guys looking forward to, with regards to the development of immersive media through your creative expertise and enterprise?
[Sonwabo] We’re looking forward to experimenting with what we have right now, using that to explore multiple ways of telling our stories through this media. I also believe that we’ll need a team of people that are experts in the field, so, I’m also looking forward to Re/Member your Descendants not just being a project, but also as a movement, exploring different parts of Africa and the world. I’m looking forward to receiving feedback on how the project is making an impact and also, how the stories are viewed by the audience. The launch itself was really cool for me as I got to see how even kids were interacting with this media on the street. It’s really interesting to gather that information from them because they are really into this new immersive media technology. [Xabiso] I really think that there’s so much culture and so many stories across Africa, across the Diaspora and the entire world that can be told and need to be told, and engaging people in their stories and turning them into these ancestors. Even with what Sonwabo said around having a team of professionals and us getting even more professional, the immersive space having existed for some time, is still at the forefront and precipice of really breaking into the mainstream and being something that everybody is constantly using. I really want Re/Member your Descendants to be one of those projects that was there from the beginning of the becoming of digital art. I’m going to be in the mountains for the next couple of days, so how do you get a VR headset in a two-hour drive into the mountain and make sure that the people accessing it know how to use it? Those are some of the questions that we need to be chatting about.
Q
Sonwabo, with your focus on spirituality and knowing your descendants, what are you looking forward to achieving through the event?
I’m looking forward to exploring new ways that people can interact with our work, and getting feedback so we can start building connections. Constructive criticism, as well as working with technologies in an African landscape are also an important part of the process. Acknowledging the fact that there will be glitches here and there, is also a learning curve for us. From the launch alone, there were a lot of things that we learned, like putting up the work and all those challenges that we learn from, we’ll keep building towards perfecting this craft and perfecting the project, and really trying to fine tune all the different ways of approaching things.
Interview by Ntokozo Mabuza
