Drawing on the evolution of a larger body of work entitled ‘Siviwe – We [Are] Heard,’ this video submission demonstrates where video, digitisation, access to and shareability of materials, and dialogues across the global south continue to open up sites and possibilities for creative (and critical) explorations of how a past could have unfolded if the few/limited/distributed fragments that remain had been given agency/space to do so. Through both form and approach, this multi-layered and multi-disciplinary project welcomes ways of creating multilingual bodies of experience that explore alternate languages and trajectories that mess with, complicate and interrupt  the epistemological violence of Western fashion taxonomies, collections, canons and conditions.

In ‘Thinking with Fragments’ we ask, how does this method demonstrate radical difference/interruption? Does this praxis disrupt a canon? How does this form of radical imagining welcome alternative trajectories of oppressed diversities? And, what can this show about rebirth, haunting, ideas, trauma, alternative ontologies, and more.

Expanding both thinking and language around concepts of African fashion, this reflective film montage affirms the pedagogy of the African Fashion Research Institute’s online course African Fashion (?) that co-crafted new discursive tools with which to elicit processes of (re)membering beyond language, shifting through argument with the radical discontinuities and possibilities of fragments of identities, whilst recognising the emotional toil – and trauma – of African creatives in their journeys to self. In this praxis, we invite you to share in the (g)hosting of memories as we project our voices and visions from the Afropresent.