This experimental graphic memoir is set in an afrosurrealist VR dreamscape that explores the meaning of "home" and reclaims Ainslee's Ethiopian-American mixed-race identity. Ferenj redefines boundaries between fragmented memories and the digital imaginary.—Ainslee Alem Robson
Ferenj is a VR pointcloud dreamscape generated using crowdsourced data and built using gaming technology. I asked people to contribute short clips of Cleveland and Addis Ababa for my creative exploration of what it means for "home" to be constructed transnationally and immaterially in the second generation. In this immersive graphic memoir, the idea of "home" is visualized through my own experience as an in-between phenomena of history, language, culture, music, and time as you drift through reconstructed memories from Empress Taytu Ethiopian Restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio to the streets of Piassa, Bole, Megenagna, and Merkato in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This afrosurrealist experience is an experimental form of emancipatory thought and resistance to othering, reclaiming the narrative of my Ethiopian-American mixed race identity, and redefining boundaries between fragmented memories and the digital imaginary while contributing to the movement to change reductive and stereotypical narratives of Africa.
The world of Ferenj is generated using photogrammetry and portrayed as pointclouds (a series of spatialized points). Pointclouds are beautiful and ethereal. As you near them in proximity they become abstract and intangible whereas when seen at a distance, they form a discernible image-much like the cognitive process of trying to remember, like tezeta itself. This world-design choice complicates the viewer's experience of reality. Rushdie writes that "the metaphor of a cinema screen" can be used "to discuss this business of perception: 'Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, ...until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars' faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; ...it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality.'
Aesthetically speaking, the points are irregular and fragmented with missing pieces. These form a curated collection of spatialized memories while uniting the visual with the conceptual. Memory is always in a state of fragmentation; some moments are irretrievably lost, and the remains are scarred for better or for worse by the imprints of what was before.
