PRESERVING Culture for future generations, elevating it for right now.
How much do we really know about the cultures, traditions, and histories that make us? Who gets to decide what is worth remembering? Who gets to tell the stories?
do the stories even exist in our collective imagination?
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DISORIENT.WORLD
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2017 –
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– Founder
– Creative Director
– Writer / Editor -
– Reach: Active across Africa, North America, East Asia, Europe
– Awards: E-Squared Investments Experiment Fund
– Key Projects: The Collaboratory Research Fund (USD 50,000)
CONTEXT
Disorient arrived as existential crisis.
It was during my cousin’s Nelengu: a traditional Tamil ceremony held before a wedding. At the time, I couldn’t tell you much more about the ceremony. I knew there was a lot of turmeric paste involved, and that we – the bridal party – would get to lather the bride in it until she was marinated gold and ready to be blessed (or roasted?) by the gods.
Cue the crisis: of the people around me, it was my grandmother’s generation of matriarchs leading operations. They knew what went where, how, and why. The rest of us looked to them for instruction. In weddings – as in funerals, births, sickness, and every major rite of passage in a person’s life.
What will happen when those who carry knowledge of the cultures and ways of living that form part of who we are pass on?
Do they take their libraries with them to the next life?
Could the rest of us – emigrant, assimilated, ‘worldly’ or not, ‘culturally untethered’ or culturally dominated – could we access this knowledge if we needed or wanted to?
From these questions, the idea of Disorient.world was born.
THE WORK
Work In Progress
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Work In Progress –
Today: Disorient.WORLd is a platform and studio dedicated to elevating the voice, visibility, and ventures of the world’s overlooked and underrepresented.
Follow Along
@disorient.world
IN THE PRESS
A kind of digital archive of cultural pasts and presents, as well as an alternative mapping of Johannesburg and San Francisco, with their first-hand experiences of these spaces as the reader’s guide.
— CHRISTA DEE, BUBBLEGUM CLUB
…An ambitious digital project aimed to build a cross-continental library of diasporic knowledge.