PROJECT DETAILS

Digital Animation  |  01:00  |  Silent  |  2026

Conceptual Background

The work was created in response to a film festival challenge requiring a horror micro-short. The artist bypassed traditional cinematic genre tropes to confront the historical reality of the transatlantic slave trade and the systemic enslavement of Black people in America. Conceived as a silent counter-narrative to upcoming national 250-year commemoration events, the piece challenges societal desensitization to historical atrocities. It interrogates the compliance of passive onlookers by reframing the Middle Passage as the definitive, foundational horror story of the modern era.

Artwork Synopsis

Operating entirely without music or vocalizations, this silent animation uses geometric abstraction to document the violent displacement of human lives. Domestic structures are coded in the colors of the African flag, while white outlines depict families, couples, and children in celebratory movement. This communal choreography is abruptly shattered as the white outlines are systematically torn from their homes and compressed into the lower registers of a ship hull.

The closing composition shifts to the palette of the American flag, tracking a white vessel on blue water as red blood rains down from the upper register. As the elements dissipate, the final frame reveals three identical, synchronized vessels carrying captives. This stark arrangement functions as a haunting historical echo, subverting childhood textbook imagery of colonial discovery ships to expose the industrial scale of historical trauma.