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About
MISSING BLACK TECHNOFOSSILS HERE

"Missing Black Technofossils Here - looks at public monuments as an ancient Pan-African practice of preserving ideas, beliefs and stories for the future like a time capsule. From this lens, this project looks at absent, erased and not yet told memories and narratives of Black African Canadians whose stories and data are not preserved as public memorials yet. These stories have been missing, especially in Toronto and Montreal's landscapes - the two cities in Canada with the most extensive and diverse Black populace.  The project will encourage users to engage with Afrofuturism concepts through Augmented Reality to map some of these missing technofossils." - Quentin VerCetty 

Key terms:

  • Sankofanology /san-ko-fah-näləjē/ (noun)

A term coined by Quentin VerCetty in 2017 after it was given to him by oral historians in Ghana. 
Sankofanology is the study and analysis of pan-African application, practice, dubbing, remixing, and applied science of using the West African concept of Sankofa to demonstrate that time does not exist on a singular dimension but rather the African past, present and future are all interconnected and overlaps (2020, p. 92)

VerCetty, Q. (2020). A Likkle Innerstanding Of Sankofanology. In Q. VerCetty, & A. Hudson (Eds.), Cosmic Underground Northside: An Incantation of Black Canadian Speculative Discourse & Innerstandings (pp. 88-94). San Francisco: Cedar Grove Publishing. http://cedargrovebooks.com/Books/cosmic-northside/

  • Technofossil. /ˈteknō/fos·sil / (noun)

A term that comes out of the Anthropocene scholarship, which is the effect human activities have on the planet.
Technofossils are human-made artifacts often made out of non-natural or human manipulated materials beyond a natural human life span, including cement, alloy metals, and plastics. The term also refers to the remain or preservation of technology for the future.

 

(Farmer, J. (2018). Technofossils. In G. Mitman, M. Armiero, & R. Emmett (Eds.), future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (pp. 191-199). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Waters, C. N., Barnosky, A. D., & Haff, P. (2014). The technofossil record of humans. The Anthropocene Review, 1(1), 34–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019613514953;

https://theanthropocene.org/topics/technofossils/)

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