COLLATERAL ECHOES VR
Baff Akoto & Baff Akoto / Luke Moody, Lidz-Ama Appiah & Lidz-Ama Appiah / United Kingdom
COLLATERAL ECHOES is a new VR artwork. It is concerned with the 150+ Black Britons who have died at the hands of the police since records began in 1969.
Through sensorial renderings of archival images, artefacts and oral testimonies from those bereaved this work questions how personal commemoration might be experienced as a collective memorial.
This project is conceived as a Virtual Reality artwork which blurs the boundaries between expanded cinema and immersive technology. The concept and form of this artwork combine to create living breathing portraits of people who have been killed – the result of longterm dialogue, and creative exchange with relatives who have survived them. The depiction of these absent subjects is the result of conversations with those who survived the violent, tragic and state-initiated deaths of their mothers, sons and siblings. A selection of archival images, artefacts and oral testimonies provided by the survivors of 12 people killed after police contact will take an audience beyond the statistics, inquests and miscarriages of justice to build a human, poignant and esoteric commemoration of the lives and memories behind the names of those who have been killed in this way. What does it mean when recurring themes around mental health, the immigrant experience and racial justice are constantly present throughout the recollections in this work. The audience will experience this artwork as a Virtual Reality experience with digitally rendered environments, and 2D archival video with immersive sound design. This will tour as an installation, a location-based experience, and be distributed as a standalone VR artwork.
Artistically my aim with this work is help audiences move beyond questionable police testimony, discredited coroners’ reports, reductive news packages and dismaying inquest verdicts and instead focus their intimate attention on the humanity, potential and personalities of those killed after police contact in the UK. A VR memorial for the digital era commemorating those no longer with us.
The deployment of lethal force by agents of the state both internationally (Putin in Ukraine) and internally (police killings in Tottenham or police shootings in Stockwell) has never been under more scrutiny. The de facto post colonial understanding that state “might is right” is undergoing an unprecedented kicking in the public global consciousness in a post George Floyd world. The contemporary relevance of this artwork lies in the fact that it explores the longstanding UK context of these considerations. In a way that is currently absent from the mainstream discourse. The average Brit is more likely to be able to name an American person killed by the police than the hundreds of fatalities which have occurred around the UK over the past decades. With a disproportionate number of those killed in the UK hailing from Black and immigrant communities, this artwork provokes questions around how power is wielded, by whom and questions if all British lives are equally valued by this state we all call home.
A NOTE REGARDING THE AUDIO MATERIAL PROVIDED:
Due to the sensitive nature of this project we have purposefully not produced images to date. We care for our contributors, how and who hears their stories. We have chosen to share audio material at this stage, short interview exerts that allow you to connect. We encourage you to close your eyes whilst listening. Although there is no graphic content contained in these words, they are original interview exerts in a raw form (not how they would appear in the final work), so we would like to prewarn the listener of the potentially emotionally upsetting nature of this content:
