“Travel stories built by visual improvisation”
As I listened to Rebecca Jones use phrases such as “definitions of travel” and “perceptions of others” in sentences prefaced by “South Western Nigeria”, I was intrigued to see what she would make out of her research on travel writing. The panel session was aptly labelled ‘Emergent Discourses on African Literature’. As an idea it seemed predicated on contributors showcasing ‘new and emergent trends in approaches to African Literature’. By the way, the scene I have just described happened last year at Africa Writes 2015.
Where Rebecca was going became clearer once she began to showcase her reference material such as locally published intra-country travel writing across Nigeria, from historical archives and contemporary works of writers such as Pelu Awofeso (Waka-about) and Folarin Kolawole (NaijaTreks). These writers use travel writing to tell their audience about the complex urban and varied rural cultures that make up Nigeria. Some of these stories are unknown, unexpressed accurately or perhaps ignored, by mainstream local and international media.
My mind wandered to how children (between the ages of seven to eleven) living in the UK pictorially placed in an African travel narrative might flourish, as meaning-makers, from the writer’s seed.
Imagine kids in their junior years, collaboratively interpreting and constructing their own adaptation of Pelu Awofeso’s travel stories? Let’s tentatively assume a theme: “travel stories built by visual improvisation”, for this exploratory project.
I approached Rebecca Jones and Pelu Awofeso, a series of conversations ensued. We realised “travel stories built by visual improvisation” resonated with us.
Rebecca, Pelu and myself decided to consider ‘playfulness based research’ as a set up of environmental conditions where a culturally diverse team of children engage in creative collaboration. We could be looking at how children’s ideas are influenced by their interpretation of pictorial or video documentaries, making meaning around another’s observation.
What new worlds might they imagine, what new stories would they create, based on Pelu’s travel stories about Nigeria? How could children, whose learning experiences reside partly in the English National Curriculum, re-imagine places in Africa for themselves with Pelu’s travel stories as an inspiration?
This discussion is part of a development process for a series of junior year kids’ story visualisation work-shops. It is being designed around participatory story-telling; collaborative re-framing, re-creating environments and characters from the ground-up. Activities will range from visual thinking exercises to co-interpretation of Pelu’s stories by kids. We are keen to explore various meaning making approaches that resonate with juniors as an ideas generating audience. The idea is to explore approaches to telling African travel stories, with juniors, in a physical and emotional way that crosses perspectives, borders, physical and digital experiences.
Approaches
Formats may cross-over from ‘pop-up’ illustration, digital first content to three-dimensional ‘paper-engineered’ content as theatre.
We need to consider a mix of semi-formally structured and free-wheeling imagination sessions to elicit visual thinking in children. We have assumed that puzzled and curious kids are typically inspired by fun challenges to bring unfamiliar themes and mythic ideas alive, in their imagination.
A road map: work in progress
The process starts off with a workshop — ‘Africa Travel Writing Encounters’ — on March 9 2016. It is being organised by Rebecca Jones and hosted by her Department (of African Studies and Anthropology) at the University of Birmingham, England.
A co-design taster
We will be adopting co-design principles to collaboratively question the idea of authorship for African travel stories when re-framed by children who do not live in the world where the original travel story resides. This is with a view to giving them ownership of the travel story and access to what it means from their own world-view. This theme will form the basis of our ‘participatory’ panel session at ‘Africa Travel Writing Encounters’, titled ‘Theorising and experimenting with African Travel Writing’.
Osogbo’s feet of words: a creative outline
These feet of words are itchy, the type whose impulse is to travel as stories re-imagined by junior minds. A re-framed Osogbo; a mythological community as a life-form called Osun-Osogbo, is inspiration for a treasure trove of stories by children about harvests in granaries that transform into vivid scenes from lively festival processions.
Initial thoughts and preconceptions
A visual discovery workshop, informed by the first workshop , will be designed around visual thinking methods and collaborative drawing sessions between a small team of five to ten children, Pelu, Rebecca, Karo Akpokiere (an observational documentary inspired illustrator as a story artist), a pop-up book manufacturer, a script writer-in-residence as production designer, a documentary film-maker, a user experience designer, a child-centred book publisher and perhaps an animator.
We intend to adopt — ‘Osogbo’s feet of words’ — as a starting point, with photography and documentary video functioning as visual literacy reference points for ideas. With a team of juniors testing out their visual literacy skills and multidisciplinary creators playing an interpretative role where kid-imagined detailed description of scenes, places and characters are collaboratively sketched, to evoke a sensory experience. We will deliberate on how to grow these scenes and characters with a script writer. We then open up with the story’s outline around the juniors’ preferred narrative structure. Children will be encouraged to pick at and question their story’s plot mapped out across a number of large storyboards with help from a facilitator.
A participatory process where children do not have geographic proximity to Osogbo question and re-frame Pelu’s point of view? It is loaded with imaginative possibilities in the hands of skilled collaborators and project management team; user-experience, story-telling, product design and production know-how.
What impact could gradual knowing in action have on children’s imaginations when looking at unfamiliar (but recognisable) moving imagery or still pictures from Osun-Osogbo?
It will be interesting to see how this process reflects participating juniors as perceptive. We imagine a diverse range of empowered keen observers and meaning makers with fertile minds.
Paying attention to the audience experience in which ‘travel-stories’ reside
User experience and seamless data informed product design across all interaction media is intrinsic to the story making process. We are forging relationships with user experience design teams, digital creative community, festival programmers and production partners from our networks; to consider social interaction possibilities, define visual languages, demonstration and viewing capabilities.
More on this to come later.
Pelu Awofeso is a travel writer, journalist and publishing entrepreneur based in Lagos, Nigeria. For over ten years Pelu has been travelling across Nigeria and publishing travel writing in newspapers in Nigeria and beyond, and in his own travel books. His most recent book is ‘Tour of Duty’, which documents ten months travelling the width and breadth of Nigeria, and tells the stories of people and places he encounters on the way, from the sand sellers of Yenagoa to hunters in Osogbo.
Rebecca Jones, alongside her research on travel writing, is an editor of Africa in Words, a blog that focuses on cultural production and Africa. Africa in Words covers books, art, film, history, music, theatre, ideas and people and the ways they interact, through their publication and circulation, with societies, economies and space.
And myself
We are looking to bring out the knowledge and imagination in the room with this workshop and panel audience (with a few juniors) — ‘Theorising and experimenting with African Travel Writing’ — by engaging with participants. We will visually explore ‘shared archetypes’, discover and think through experience pathways that might draw in a 7–11 year old audience into travel stories.
