ANCESTRAL DISSERTATIONS is our current artistic programme that will look at African ancestral and cultural knowledge systems with the aim of centering the voices of creatives of colour, and engaging diaspora communities.

The aim is to explore how people within the African Diaspora community cater to place-making and self-preservation through ancestral knowledge, oral traditions, cultural artistic practices, experiences, and cultural relationships. By creating spaces, decolonial practices, and processes as a form of reclaiming language, and how we can speak further to issues of mental wellbeing and social connection.

Our creative process seeks to investigate and translate ancestral knowledge that conveys stories, meanings, insight on issues of mental health and social connection by expanding the understanding of wellbeing and connection into accessible formats such as prose and poetry, memorates, proverbs, photography and film.

Through these creative disciplines, we endeavour to explore the process of oral traditions as an alternative way of being, knowing, and doing to academic knowledge and theorising in a contemporary context to promote mental health, as well as social connection in the African Community.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body.