Relic Traveller is a new multi-disciplinary project manifesting in performance, audio, moving image and prose. Taking place across various landscapes and locations, the piece builds upon a postcolonial perspective informed by technology, agency and the body, and narratives of migration.
The themes in Relic Traveller were recently introduced in ‘Ph03nix Rising: The Mogya Project’ (2016-17), during Achiampong’s 2015-16 Sound & Music Embedded residency at the British Library. ‘Ph03nix Rising’ involved the re-presenting audio samples from communities in nations throughout West Africa. These samples were sourced from the library’s World and Traditional Music Archive and included early Edwardian-era audios through to contemporary field recordings. Positioned with imagery from a Science-fiction-based videogame, these audio-visual texts formed a manuscript of intergenerational colonial legacies, culminating in a multi-medium performance.
In Voyage of The Relic Traveller the performance will reveal a score of two videos: one a live, remixed journey (in collaboration with fellow artist Shiraz Bayjoo) that details complex narratives of history and identity from a science-fictional perspective. The other – a set of virtual landscapes hacked (by Larry Achiampong) from a videogame that eerily connect to future colonial narratives.