Decolonizing the imaginary through the tactical use of machinimas

Isabelle Arvers
LARSyS, Interactive Technologies Institute (ITI), Faculdade de Belas-Artes, Universidade de Lisboa (FBAUL), Portugal Meyrargues, France
iarvers@gmail.com

Abstract: This essay starts from a reading of Decolonizing the Virtual: Future Knowledges and the Extrahuman in Africa, a collection of essays published in the Journal of African Studies in March 2021, responses, and commentaries to the Abiola lecture delivered by Achille Mbembe in 2016 in the context of #Rhodesmustfall and the new light given by this movement to the question of decolonizing knowledge ¹. During this lecture, Mbembe states that Africans are better able to leap into the digital because there is a similarity between the plasticity of pre-colonial knowledge and the plasticity of digital virtuality. I therefore sought to know if this hypothesis could be verified: is the digital, through immersive works, video games, and machinimas , a good way to document, archive, represent, and promote oral tradition and ancestral knowledge? And it is then that I discovered the text of Lia Beatriz Teixeira Torraca published in April 2021 on the Aesthetic look of affect which analyses the machinima as being a medium allowing to change the point of view, to proceed to a displacement, to a reterritorialization while simultaneously presenting multiple worlds and spaces, often invisibilized ².

Keywords: Decolonizing, Imaginary, Ancestral, Knowledge, Machinima, Deterritorializaton, Reterritorialization, Games, Indigenous, Pluriversalism

Introduction: New perspectives on knowledge decolonisation in the digital era

This text is an exploration of the different possibilities offered by digital technology to enter into discussion and allow for exchanges of knowledge and skills between ancestral techniques and knowledge and digital creations, by illustrating my remarks with different examples of works and games mixing ancestrality, speculative fiction, and digital creations, and by focusing on the experiences of machinima workshops conducted during the Art & Games World Tour, which, in Togo and Kenya, have made it possible to experiment with the mixing of imaginary worlds and the sharing of knowledge and to archive an oral culture that has been invisibilized by colonization and Christianity. This approach resonates with movements such as ancestro-futurism and techno-shamanism in Brazil and with indigenous futurism which, relying on speculative fiction, imagines futures free of colonization ^{3  4}.

I will begin by returning to the notions of decolonization of knowledge and the idea of pluriversality discussed by Mbembe in Abiola, and then analyze the various arguments supporting his remarks on the possible parallel between pre-colonial knowledge and the virtuality of the digital and by extension with the virtual universes of video games.

If I have chosen to approach video game creation from a decolonial angle in the Art & Games World in the Global South, it is because the global gaming market is still dominated by Europe, the United States, and Japan, and to speak of the art and games decolonization is to promote works conceived on the periphery of this global and globalizing culture and to be able to immerse oneself in other types of representations, conceived and expressed in other languages, allowing one to evolve in other cities and land- scapes and through other stories and cosmogonies. It is to accompany and promote the emergence of a market of contents from the Global South. This is a recent phenomenon, linked to the rise of mobile phones and the Internet, which, as Mbembe points out, allows the younger generations to express themselves and have access to the media like never before. In the field of video games, the market is no longer solely a market of subcontracting or localization of games produced in the West. Many independent studios are emerging in Asia, Latin America, and Africa and are producing content for the local market as well as for the global market.

It is thus that new voices emerge by reappropriating the narrative on themselves in order to no longer be an exotic context but rather the own enunciation of their representation. It also seeks to decolonize the imaginary by the co-construction of narrations born of the meeting between oral tradition, endogenous knowledge, and virtual universes of video games.

The necessary dialog between knowledge

As Victoria Bernal reminds us when Achille Mbembe speaks at Abiola, he does so in the very particular context of the post #Rhodesmustfall movement, the South African student uprising for decolonization of knowledge, which will give a new dimension to the notion of decolonisation, based on « Pan Africanism, black consciousness and black radical feminism. » as defined by Abdul Kayum Ahmed ^{5 6}.

In this context, Mbembe begins by recalling the pitfalls of decolonization, at the risk of Africanisation, a criticism formulated by Frantz Fanon in the aftermath of decolonisation when power was transferred from the colonists to an African middle-class society of which he was suspicious, and at the risk of an identity withdrawal, while it is important to teach African languages and to express oneself and create in African languages, decolonization, according to him, does not consist of debunking universalist knowledge and replacing it with other, more particularistic knowledge, but rather of thinking in terms of pluriversalism. ^{7 8}

A concept brought by Enrique Dussel, and Anibal Quijano to demonstrate that modernity developed concomitantly with colonialism by destroying ancestral cultures and knowledge ^9 10. Pluriversalism can only be achieved by « recognizing this asymmetry of knowledge ». This openness and dialogue can therefore only take place if there is a recognition of the different epistemicides to which the cultures of the countries of the South have been subjected as shown by Boaventura de Sousa Santos by silencing languages, traditions, vernacular knowledge or by reappropriating them without paying them homage, or by invisibilizing them or demonizing them ¹¹)! In Brazil, 3000 languages were spoken before colonization, today only 188 languages remain” affirms Ricardo Ruiz in an online interview. Francis Nyamnjoh indeed shows why it is difficult to create a dialogue between the so-called traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge if such knowledge is denigrated as witchcraft or primitivism ¹². On the contrary, it is better to consider these knowledges as techniques.

This is what Ricardo Ruiz, the designer of the online game Contos de Ifa , explains about its game that blends ancestrality and digital technologies to introduce people to the tradition of the Orishas, the nature spirits of the Candomble religion, which was brought to Latin America by slaves from West Africa.

« Women, before the witch hunt that deprived them of their relationship to nature and sources of knowledge, knew techniques. The same is true for the Orisha tradition, it is about techniques. Let’s say you are initiated into Oshun , then I would have to know all the instruments, the plants, the smells, the colors, the drumbeat, and the predictions that we have for Oshun. If you are blessed by Oshun, it means that you come from a river. Practitioners of this religion extract the energy from the river using these combined objects and dance it into your body, and then that energy takes your body and dances for a while and then goes away. For this Orisha, we have this knife, this plate, these are all the different variables and then you have the pro- cess, you cut the chicken, you sing a song, first we sing for the earth because the earth is going to receive the blood, which as a technique, carries the energy of life, so you have to play for the earth, you bring the life of an animal that you are going to eat, you bring it back to the earth, and at the same time you are opening up a way to speak to the earth… »

Figure 1 Ritual to Osu and Jemandja by the Nigerian Performer Jelili Atiku

Beyond this necessary recognition, Aghi Bahi specifies that this dialogue between knowledge must be thought of not as a juxtaposition but rather as a reciprocal exchange where each opens up to the other ¹³. This pre-colonial knowledge and techniques must be studied and come to resonate with scientific knowledge, without which traditional knowledge finds itself on the « periphery of the periphery », considers Paulin Hountondji. « Peripheral to metropolitan science, institutional research in Africa in turn leads to a secondary peripheralisation of endogenous bodies of knowledge, relegating them to the periphery of the periphery. » ¹⁴.

An approach followed by Roy Ascott, Tania Fraga, and Maria Luysa Fragoso in 1997, in their meeting with the Kuikuros, a tribe located in the North of the State of Mato Grosso, in the National Park on the Xingu River in Brazil, not having been evangelized and having kept intact their shamanic beliefs in a multidimensional world. Roy Ascott, who was working on the idea of Shamantics and double consciousness, wanted to immerse himself in the knowledge of the Kuikorus, who live permanently between three worlds: the earth, the sky, and the underworld, as told by Maria Luysa Fragoso in an online interview. Roy Ascott will then write about the parallels between the shamanic double consciousness and the possibilities offered by cybernetics and immersive or networked works to act at a distance and be able to perceive several worlds. Roy Ascott suggests, « Cyberception and the double gaze. It is as if, through our bio-telematics art, we are weaving what I would call a !shamantic” web, combining the sense of shamanic and semantic, the navigation of consciousness and the construction of meaning.” ¹⁵.

For this encounter to take place, it requires an elimination of the hierarchy of knowledge and also passes through the notion of co-learning to which another text by Achille Mbembe on the decolonization of knowledge and the question of the archive refers: « In order to set our institutions firmly on the path of future knowledge, we need to reinvent a classroom without walls in which we are all co-learners; a university that is capable of convening various publics in new forms of assemblies that become points of convergence of and platforms for the redistribution of different kinds of knowledge. » ¹⁶).

As Katrien Type reminds us, Achille Mbembe relies here on the work of Jane Guyer on Ecuadorian societies in which knowledge is not the business of a few, nor of an elite, possessing alone the keys to an inaccessible knowledge, but based on an exchange of knowledge and techniques ¹⁷. Knowledge should no longer be the business of a small elite, but that of all, as was the case in Burundi before colonization, where knowledge was not only held and promulgated by griots or priests but was held by all, in a collective manner. « In Burundi, mythical and historical traditions were never the prerogative of specialists compared to the griots of West Africa or the abiru of neighboring Rwanda. Each Burundian was, to every degree, the custodian of the ancestral heritage that was transmitted, from generation to generation, during vigils where the talent of each person was free to express itself.” ¹⁸.

This necessary dialogue between these different modes of knowledge, in which digital technology is redefining the contours of access to knowledge, requires a paradigm shift. Science and human thought are no longer the only sources of knowledge; it is now possible to think with Eduardo Kohn of knowledge « beyond the human. » ¹⁹. This implies recognised as Jeremy Narby that nature thinks, that animals think, and that non-humans can teach us techniques and knowledge, by making a change of perspective, referring here to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro ^{20 21}.

This leads us to reconsider shamanism or pre-colonial modes of communication as techniques and modes of knowledge and learning, in the same way as scientific knowledge, considered until now as the only source of knowledge. When I ask Daniela Fernandez, author of the ITA game about the legends of her people the Guarani, indigenous people of Northern Argentina, to explain her working process, she explains in an online interview:

« Personally, I have been lucky enough to be in the physical spaces they inhabited, in the Paraguay River, in Chaco and Formosa, but I am also lucky enough to dream of other worlds and have access to other types of images outside of the plausible, which serve as inspiration when I create. To a skeptic, these dreams would be influenced by the stories I heard as a child, but to a believer, these dreams are influenced by my ancestors. »

Figure 2: ITA a video game designed by Daniela Fernandez about her indigenous ancestors © Daniela Fernandez

Plasticity of pre-colonial knowledge and plasticity of the virtual

As Eleonore Hellio, a member of the artistic duo the Kongo Astronauts in Kinshasa, pointed out to me in an online conversation, « In Congo, we live with the second world all the time. » This ability to think the real and the virtual simultaneously, in the sense that Pierre Lévy understands it, i.e., as being in the process of being real, thus as another mode of the real, according to Mbembe, allows Africans to embrace the virtuality of the digital in an innate way ²². Therefore he puts forward the idea that Africa is better prepared to make a leap into the digital because there are enormous similarities between the plasticity of pre-colonial knowledge and the plasticity of the virtual.

This question intrigues me because in the context of the elaboration of a decolonial geography of art and video games, I was led to exhibit digital works and video games conceived by a new generation of indigenous artists and game designers in Asia and Latin America, and then during my stay in Togo and Kenya I was able to collaborate with traditional storytellers to conceive films from virtual video game universes, thus mixing ancestrality, oral tradition and virtual environments. Mbembe adds that « in old African traditions » people « were constantly in search of a supplement to their human hood, » sometimes adding « attributes or properties taken from the worlds of animals, plants, and various objects. »

Africans, however, are not the only ones to have retained this pre-colonial knowledge within themselves and the ability to communicate with other beings or non-humans. The indigenous peoples of Latin America as we have seen previously or, for example, of Asia also have a capacity to apprehend different modalities of apprehension of reality. In Indonesia, but also in Taiwan, the spirits of nature, trees, mountains, and water, are constantly invoked, objects are charged, and have the power to mediate with spirits or spectral beings.

As Amry Anton, from the Serlok Bantaran community in Bandung, Indonesia, who was responsible for cleaning rivers of plastic in July 2019, « The spirits are constantly around us, if we don’t see them it’s because there are so many of them that if we saw them we wouldn’t be able to move freely in space. »

Co-learning pedagogy in machinima work shops

The daily presence of spirits also appeared to me in Brazil when I gave a machinima workshop in 2016 as part of my residency at Ruralscapes in Sao Jose de Barreiro. A residency on a farm in the heart of the mountains, on the border of the states of Mina Gerais, Sao Paulo, and Rio, whose aim was to put in relation traditional knowledge and techniques with electronic or digital technologies. During this residency, the machinima workshops – making films from video game engines – aimed to use video games as a means of emancipation for these young future farmers. After playing and discovering many independent games, I found myself confronted with the apparent blockage of young people to tell or write stories. I came back the next day and asked them to take me to the streets of their village, Sao Jose de Barreiro, to show me the places that were important to them and to explain why. In each place, we took pictures and interviewed them on the microphone. Two stories about spirits emerged.

The first Matadouro is the story of a matador, killed by a cow, whose spirit comes back to haunt the walls of the village houses. The second, Espiritos , takes place in the house of a poet who died at home but was found much later by his neighbors, whose spirit remains in the house. In ten years of workshops, I had never had spirit stories from children or teenagers whose imaginations are rather influenced by mainstream TV shows or video games, mostly from the US or Europe. It was also the first time in the history of these workshops that we mixed two modalities of reality: photographs of the village of Sao Jose de Barreiro, the abandoned slaughterhouse, cows, streets, and vegetation, with avatars and 3D objects. Another important aspect of this experience is that the use of the virtual worlds of the video games allowed us to communicate, without being able to use spoken language to be able to exchange between us, but we understood ourselves with these young people thanks to the mediation of the visual universes of the video games.

Figure 3: Matadouro a machinima mixing real photographs and 3D avatars © Isabelle Arvers

In this workshop experience, there was also a co-learning and exchange of skills and knowledge: I learned from the children, new working methods and I learned about local beliefs and myths while teaching them how to use game engines to be able to represent reality and tell my guides, my teachers, my facilitators, and I was able to see their daily lives through their eyes.These first few examples show, first of all, that there are many similarities between pre-colonial knowledge and digital virtuality, but also that there is a propensity in this exchange to abolish hierarchies between knowledge and between learners and facilitators. A change in the pedagogical relationship allows a teacher who learns from his students and the learners to emancipate themselves in Jacques Rancière’s words, because they already have all the knowledge in themselves, it is just a matter of getting it out ²³.

In addition to being better able to apprehend several levels of reality as seen previously in the South, Mbembe adds that Africans are also used to decentering themselves from humans by conferring mediumnic powers on objects, which predisposes them to embrace the mobile culture of entertainment.

Mathematics, cybernetics and ancestral knowledges

Katrin Pype illustrates Mbembe’s remarks by giving examples of objects that can be assimilated to computers, either because they are charged with power and give access to other worlds and allow the acquisition of knowledge, or because the elements of which they are composed, the cowries, can be assimilated to pixels, as if they allowed to see other images, other representations, and realities. This is the case with the Lukasa, the memory objects of the Luba that record stories and can be compared physically and spiritually to « memory cards” ²⁴. The similarity between the Lukasa and the computer also brings to mind the Khipu, the first analogical computer of the Incas, made of strings and knots, allowing the calculation and forecasting of the future, thanks to the observation and analysis of the constellations of stars by the ancestors. Constanza Pina, a Chilean artist based in Mexico City, learned the Khipu data coding system through workshops and created a sound installation mixing ancestral knowledge and electronic circuits.

An analogy between ancestral knowledge, mathematics and cybernetics can be found in Ron Eglash’s work on fractals in Adinkras, the art of the Ashanti people in Ghana. In Adinkra, each symbol tells a story, a proverb, or refers to beliefs. Their forms also have a mathematical meaning, « especially in the ways that they use logarithmic curves to represent organic growth. »[25] Ron Eglash, in his text on the positive perception of race in design, shows that beyond denouncing the racist biases that exist in artificial intelligence and on the Internet, it is necessary to decolonize algorithms by calling upon ancestral knowledge and their modes of visual representation to derive mathematical formulas, which are also used in cybernetics ²⁵.

A way to turn to the visual, spiritual, and mathematical representations of the ancestral world to remove the bias of our understanding of the present and enrich it. An approach that we find in the work of Tania Fraga who organized the expedition for Roy Ascottt to meet the Kuikoros in 1997. Her life and her work were deeply modified by her meeting with the Kuikuros and the observation of the vegetal forms and natural life. « It was the 10 days that changed my life. I lived with them. The Kuikuros. They did not have contact with missionaries (only 50 years of contact, and very few spoke Portuguese) and kept their shamanic beliefs intact. That was the reason I chose them.” In a beautiful text written during her stay with the Kuikoros, Tania Fraga describes a multidimensional world with shimmering colors, during which she cannot stop swimming.

« I became impregnated with their hypnotic sound. The natives painted our bodies with fragrant black resin and reddish oil transforming us into the Surucucú, the serpent. We lost the notion of time we had up to a few days before, and we began to discern another time, multidimensional, non-linear, and very complex, swinging smoothly as if it were flowing around the variations of a strange attractor. »[27] Following this experience, Tania Fraga conceived works such as ‘Xamantic Web’, ‘Xamantic Journey’ (1999), a work in VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) that examines the similarities between the shamanic journey and wanderings in virtual spaces and takes up the multi-dimensional and non-linear aspect of the Kuikorus’ perception of the world in a telematics work allowing multiple modalities of online presence and exchange; or

Figure 04: Epicurus Garden Virtual Reality worlds. Source Tania Fraga

The Epicurus Garden, (2014) a generative Garden of Eden, is presented as an immersive installation, whose forms unfold according to brain waves captured through a neural interface. Designed from growth algorithms, the plants, mushrooms, and flowers unfold in a very organic and frac- tal way according to the waves emitted by the viewers’ brain.
Fraga is also inspired by logarithmic spirals and other symbols to generate her images, she adds, « Yes, the logarithmic spiral and others, they are all connected with growth and I am fascinated with them. I use them in my work, not only on shapes but in trajectories, in relations (for example, cooler variations), in variations in general.” told Tania Fraga in an online interview.

These different examples of artistic reinterpretations of ancestral knowledge and techniques permitted by the virtuality of the digital allow to illustrate Mbembe’s remarks while insisting on the fact that these remarks are not only linked to Africans but to all the peoples who have remained in contact with and listening to ancestral knowledge and whose new generations are more likely to make a leap into the digital.

Decolonizing our imaginary

However, the stakes are high because the massive use of digital technologies transforms our way of thinking, and our imagination but also our way of being and seeing the world, and this imagination is a space to be decolonized. Accordingly, to Mbembe, « The biggest impact of the mobile phone and of digital technologies more broadly has been at the level of the imaginary. The interaction between humans and screens has intensified, and with it, the experience of life and the world as cinema-the cinematic nature of life ¹.

An idea that is at the origin of my curatorial work on the relationship between art and video games. In the mid-1990s, when I was talking to teenagers, they told me they dreamed in video games and explained to me that they loved video games so much, that they would prefer games to replace television and even that they would like to live inside games. That’s how I realized that games were shaping our imagination as tales used to do and that if games could shape our imagination, they were also a way to manipulate our minds and to spread a certain morality, ethics, certain representations of the world. And that’s why, from my first exhibitions, I focused on promoting diversity in terms of aesthetics and game plays in video games by showing the other side of video games, the artistic, experimental, and political games.

Since 2005, I also started to promote the use of video games as a medium in machinimas, a cinematographic technique and new genre that consists in hijacking video games to make films, in order to bring a distanced critique towards a simulacrum world in the sense of Guy Debord. [28] Using the virtual worlds of video games and diverting them to tell stories or use them as a means of expression allows us to manipulate the images that without this critical distance manipulate us by shaping our ways of thinking and seeing the world. For if, to use Mbembe’s words, technologies plunge us into a cinematic vision of reality, my working hypothesis is that it is most opportune to divert these technologies to think critically and reappropriate them tactically. Since 2009, I have been organizing and leading machinima workshops during which people learn how to use video games or virtual universes to produce films and thus transform an object of mass consumption into a means of expression.

Figure 05: L »aigle et le Vautour a machinima directed by the Togolese storyteller Charlotte Boane in Lomé, Togo, 2020

With the virtual storytelling workshops, conducted in close collaboration with traditional storytellers during my stays in Togo and Kenya, I am now working on the mix between oral tradition and virtual universes. Hijacking these virtual universes allows us to encounter knowledge that tends to be forgotten by most of the new generations, while their imaginations are filled with images that come from elsewhere. It is, therefore, necessary to take the distance in order to make a reflexive critique, in the sense that Rama Thiaw, a Senegalese director and author of the documentary The Revolution won’t be televised, understands it when she presents the feminist workshops, the « Artistic Sabbars » , that she has organized in Dakar with creative women. She thinks of these workshops as « reflexive » workshops, that is, workshops where the women are the « I » of their enunciation, and speak for themselves, from their point of view ²⁶.

Conclusion

It is therefore this question of the point of view from which it is possible to reappropriate the narrative that I wish to address with the practice of machinimas. The machinima can indeed be understood as a counter-gaming practice that consists in diverting video games from their initial function, which is to play, to use them in a tactical manner in order to operate a shift of perspective and to take back the initiative of the narrative and to speak from a point of view that has often had little access to the media. For as Francis Nyamnjoh rejoices, new technologies allow younger generations to have access to media and speech « to claim, express themselves, and procure social capital in spaces and places not previously accessible to them, and on issues generally considered the prerogative of their parents or the ruling elite. » ²⁷.

In the machinima »s workshops, I use this technique of designing films from video game engines to make visible forgotten knowledge buried under centuries of colonialism by collaborating with storytellers to put stories, legends, and especially pre-colonial knowledge into images. This leads the participants to tactically use images that were intended for another use. In this I join the tactical media movement which consists of using social networks, blogs, podcasts, machinimas to document, make visible, and disseminate these words and knowledge to new generations.

By transforming the player into the director and author of her/his own narrative, machinimas allow for a displacement, a reterritorialization as Lia Beatriz Teixeira Torraca indicates in her magnificent text on The aesthetic look of affect, « The machinima represents in effect the possibility of erasing the distance between the one who watches or plays and the one who expresses himself and can then become a producer of content and director of his own story… A new way of constructing the reality of spaces that are invisibilized or communicated in narratives that are not those that occupy and usurp these spaces, those that construct the spaces of war, of the post-war period, of the intervals of escape from conflict. « ²⁸

In addition to allowing for the juxtaposition of multiple types of reality by integrating photographs, live action, and voices with virtual environments, they also have the ability to alter the viewer’s relationship to the image by giving them the ability to become narrators and authors of their own narrative. The player acts and performs his character and speaks from his point of view: « Machinima is the chance to create a common space of communication mediated by affect, an alternative medium to affect and be affected by a resizing of spaces and the participation of the user/spectator/agent. It is the reconfiguration of perception and the imaginary, conjugating two spaces and multiple realities produced by the user/spectator/agent.” ²⁸

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Patricia Gouveia (FBaul, ITI, LARSyS) for her guidance and Liz, B. Teixeira Torraca for her kindness and cooperation. I also would like to thank Daniela Fernadez, Ricardo Ruiz, Tania Fraga, and Maria, L. Fragoso for our exchanges.

Author Biography

Isabelle Arvers, PHD Candidate, LARSyS, Interactive Technologies Institute (ITI), Faculdade de Belas-Artes, Universidade de Lisboa (FBAUL), Portugal, is a French artist and curator whose research focuses on the interaction between art and video games. For the past twenty years, she has been investigating the artistic, ethical, and critical implications of digital gaming. Her work explores the creative potential of hacking video games through machinima. As a curator, she focuses on video games as a new language for artists. She curated several shows and festivals around the world, including Jibambe na Tec (Nairobi, AF, 2020), Tecnofeminismo (Bogota, AF, 2019), Art Games World Tour exhibit (Buenos Aires, 2019), Interspecies Imaginaries (Overkill, 2019), Machinima in Mash Up (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016), UCLA Gamelab Festival (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 2015, 2017), Evolution of Gaming (Vancouver, 2014), Game Heroes (Alcazar, Marseille, 2011), Playing Real (Gamerz, 2007), Mind Control (Banana RAM Ancona, Italy, 2004), Node Runner (Paris, 2004) Playtime (Villette Numérique, 2002). From 2013 to 2016, she worked on art and research projects and curated and produced six antiAtlas of Borders exhibitions around the mutations of the borders in the 21st century, including The Art of Bordering at MAXXI in Roma and Coding and Decoding Borders in Brussels. She was also in charge of the End of the Map exhibition in the fall 2015 in Paris about alternative, subversive, and emotional cartography. In 2019, she embarked on an Art and Games World Tour in souths countries to promote the notion of diversity of gender, sexuality and geographic origin, focusing on queer, feminist, and decolonial practices. In 2022, Arvers is Jury member of the Prix Ars Electronica in Computer Animation. www.isabellearvers.com

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23. Jacques Rancière, Le spectateur émancipé, (éditions la Fabrique, 2008)  [↑]
24. Sasha Newell, Katrien Pype, (2021). « Decolonizing the Virtual: Future Knowledges and the Extrahuman in Africa. » in African Studies Review (Volume 64, Issue 1, March 2021)  [↑]
25. Ron Eglash, Race-positive Design: A Generative Approach to Decolonizing (Computing Conference Paper • University of Michigan April 2020) https://www.research- gate.net/publication/340418728 [↑]
26. Rama Thiaw interviewed in Les Inrocks magazine, in March 2019 https://www.lesinrocks.com/cheek/rama-thiaw-realisatrice-feminites-africaines-308826-26-03-2019/  [↑]
27. Francis B. Nyamnjoh, « Africa, the Village Belle: From Crisis to Opportunity ». in Ecquid Novi (African Journalism Studies 34, 2013) (3): 125–140. [↑]
28. Liz, B. Teixeira Torraca, « The aesthetic look of affect: reterritorializing Rio de Janeiro, in dossiê: narrativas pós- neoliberais: interseções entre o extrativismo urbano e o movimento social » Cad. Metropole 23 (50), 2021, https:// www.scielo.br/j/cm/a/cbhCFtLZh7vHWC37ZPv8gXs/abs- tract/?lang=en [↑] [↑]