Uncharted is an immersive dance performance inspired by 5,000 years of knowledge-generation from the continent of Africa. Uncharted challenges current limitations on the concept and form of an archive, by weaving together historical anecdotes, language, and performance, with transcontinental unions of Black movement and sound. Uncharted reimagines archives as an experience of embodied collective memory in a virtual space.
Ainslee Alem Robson
Image
Ainslee Alem Robson is an award-winning Ethiopian-American director, writer and media artist, and current Sundance-NEH Fellow. Her interdisciplinary practice involves an amalgam of film, installation, archival material, VR, and emerging technologies in digital art. Re-orienting emerging technologies to operate in service to, and from positions of decoloniality and Black consciousness, she creates counterimaginings and emancipatory narratives speaking to the liminal space between Africa and its diaspora. Juxtaposing both emerging and analog media, Robson’s works present temporal manipulations that radiate fluidly, actively refusing linear definition.
Her commissions and collaborations have been exhibited by the New York Times, Vellum LA, Ars Electronica, MU, ZHdK, Forum des Images, and MoMA New York respectively. Most recently, Robson has been invited to the Curator’s Special Projects “Guests From the Future” at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Lesley Lokko. Robson's non-fiction writing has been published by eFlux and Guggenheim, Art Africa, Vogue Italia, and OffRamp academic journal. She has spoken at festivals such as SXSW and academic institutions such as Cornell, ZHdK, MIT, UCLA, and GSA in Johannesburg. She holds a BA in Philosophy and French from The College of Wooster and an MA in Fiction & Entertainment from SCI-Arc.