Framing Futures

Framing Futures is an ongoing artistic research project investigating how documentary, archival materials and synthetic media can be used to confront colonial histories and imagine alternative African futures. Taking the Portuguese colonial presence in Ghana, beginning with the construction of Elmina Castle in 1482, as a historical and geographical point of departure, the project asks: how can speculative documentary and synthetic media create a counter-archive of histories that have been incompletely recorded, suppressed or mediated through colonial perspectives? Rather than treating the archive as a fixed record of the past, Framing Futures approaches it as a space of possibility, where historical evidence, memory, imagination and technological intervention can come into dialogue.

The research is developed through a process of archival investigation, fieldwork, interviews and artistic experimentation. Archival materials and historical accounts are brought together with ethnographic encounters and contemporary technologies including AI-generated voices and manipulated or reconstructed images. These synthetic elements are not used simply to reproduce historical events, but to test the boundaries between documentation, reconstruction and speculation. Through this process, the project examines the ethical and political questions that emerge when new technologies enter the documentary image: what happens when we give a voice to an absence in the archive, and what distinguishes historical evidence from artistic invention?