The Red Earth Project (2019-)
1. Conceptual Development
The name of the project, Red Earth comes from the prominence of Red Clay Earth forming much of the land of West Africa. The colour largely comes from the earth being enriched by iron and aluminium, through heavy rainfall during the rainy season. In order for this land to be usable as soil, and nutritious enough to grow crops, it has to be put through a series of processes, a practice that goes back a long way but is increasingly modernised. The
The metaphor of converting the red clay of West Africa into nutritious soil shapes the different processes and methods of translation in this project.
As is often witnessed noticeably in flora, displacement and relocation can affect the well-being of biological entities. Red Earth explores the metaphysical dissonance that occurs from living in non-linear virtual space and time across hemispheres, by distilling, partly through code, what occurs when translating thought between language forms.
These distillations take the form of geological totems, data topography as manifestations of the missing earth as it were.
These processes of translation attempt to engage with the metaphysical discord within re-routed and excavated cultural identity and led by Yoruba continuity of spirit (beyond the body), this work aims at continuous translation between forms: image, prose, code a three-act structure; moving back and forth between modes of life, physical and virtual, of the body and after the body, as a way of taking ownership of computational translation processes, which are inherently exclusive.