Global South, Digital Past and Future Echoes: A New Frontier of Memory

Text: Selim Harbi

In the Global South, the scars of colonialism run deep, etched into the very fabric of the land. The spaces once occupied by imperial powers now bear witness to a complex tapestry of histories, memories, and struggles. As we navigate the realm of the digital age, these spaces are becoming sites of intense contestation, where the power to shape narratives and preserve and uphold legacies is being redistributed. Digital decolonisation, a movement that seeks to challenge and dismantle the colonial narratives embedded in digital technologies and platforms, offers powerful tools for reclaiming these spaces and rewriting their histories. Through digital archives, online platforms, and virtual exhibitions, marginalised voices are now gaining a platform to share their experiences, counter dominant narratives, re-assert and reclaim their cultural heritage.

The process of decolonisation and commemoration is not merely about preserving and restoring the past; it is also about shaping the future. It involves critically examining how spatial memory is constructed and contested, and how narratives are appropriated and reimagined. In the Global South, commemorating horrors is often intertwined with the pursuit of forgiveness. While the pain, anguish, and trauma of colonial violence and historical disfiguration it is pertinent to consider whether digital spaces may serve as conduits for healing and reconciliation. Additionally, in embracing the potential of these technologies and spaces, are we not, in essence, fabricating, crafting, and re-designing virtual reconstructions of historical events?

Stay Alive, My Son by Victoria Bousis, offers a profound and innovative exploration of grief and resilience. This immersive experience adapts the memoires of human rights activist Pin Yathay, allowing users to embody Yathay’s story of heartbreak and hope through the Cambodian genocide. Bousis’s VR project invites viewers into a world of haunting beauty, where the personal and the universal intersect. The project delves into the complexities of parental loss, capturing the raw emotions and the enduring spirit of a father grappling with his guilt for abandoning his son to escape during the Cambodian genocide. As the viewers experience Yathay’s journey, they discover his reason for living: to reclaim all that he lost and to reunite with his son. Boussis’ use of VR technology creates a deeply empathetic experience, allowing viewers to step into Yathay’s shoes.

The virtual environment is both intimate and expansive, reflecting the internal turmoil and the vastness of grief. The project’s visual language and design convey the emotional weight of the story. Stay Alive, My Son is not merely a depiction of loss, but a testament to the human spirit’s ability to endure. Bousis offers a glimmer of hope, a reminder that even in the darkest moments, love and memory can provide solace. Exploring the human condition, this project is a poignant reminder of the fragility of life and a testament to the enduring power of art to connect and heal put into a brilliant digital and gamified dialectic.

With Unbreakable, Anthony Phills, multi-award multimedia design winner, is creating a top-notch AR project documenting one of the saddest and most tragic human events: transatlantic slavery. Unbreakable unveils the remarkable journey of Cudjoe Lewis, born in Benin and ensnared by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade despite its 1807 ban. Captured by Dahomey, he was sold to American merchants aboard the Clotilda. His story of survival and resilience culminates in Africatown, a testament to enduring hope and community.

Unbreakable AR invites users to embark on a poignant audio odyssey, narrating the brutal journey of enslaved souls from Ghana to America. Each phase—exploration, capture, suffering, and arrival—unfolds through immersive soundscapes, dynamically shaped by the user’s distance from these historical echoes, deepening the connection to their enduring legacy. Unbreakable reminds us of the long and harsh journey of Afro-Americans. Put into a digital innovative form, Phills scores high and sets an important memorial marker while creating a mesmerizing education tool.

AFROROUTES by Selim Harbi, explores important aspects of the legacy of the largest forced migration in human history: where are the descendants of the millions of displaced African men and women living today? Did their original culture and language disappear? How did their heritage contribute to constructing new countries, cultures, and communities? How has this memory subsisted, and how is it lived and celebrated today? This experience retraces three main slavery roads: the Trans-Saharian to Tangier (Morocco), the Trans-Atlantic to Salvador do Bahia (Brazil), and the Trans-Pacific to Gujarat (India).

AFROROUTES transports the user on a journey, creating a living connection to descendants of African slavery and the cultural practices of their countries of origin. A Full immersion into 3 vivid ceremonies on 3 continents, where the African memory is transmitted, and celebrated, and where invisible far stories are told and updated. In AFROROUTES the use of music and orality as a powerful and genuine narrative connector is creating living embodied archives, set as a radical response to the rarity, the disfiguration of still subsisting and one-sided addressed physical archives. With this project, Selim Harbi is bringing digital technology into the space of history and Anthropology and archiving, where the critical distance is a matter of power and domination.

The imperative of enabling the Global South to access digital technologies and generate commensurate projects to those of the Western world is underscored by the presence of considerable impediments. However, the digital decolonization movement is not without its challenges. The digital divide, which disproportionately affects marginalized communities, can limit access to these technologies and perpetuate existing inequalities and disparities. Furthermore, the commercialization of digital platforms can lead to the exploitation of cultural heritage and the erasure of Indigenous knowledge, reproducing at the end the same harmful models and schemes of disparity and injustice.

How to break through and cultivate a more equitable and genuinely representative value chain that assumes paramount significance?

To overcome these challenges, it is essential to develop an inclusive and equitable overall approach and vision of digital technologies, a fair vision that prioritizes the needs of marginalized communities, fostering inclusive dialogue instead of becoming a subtle tool of soft power, feeding the same classical cultural hegemony and alienation. It is also crucial to support initiatives that promote digital literacy and empower individuals to participate in the creation and dissemination of decolonial narratives in the West as in the South… together!