Black Planetarium – Uncharted: Anthologies Across the Atlantic
Black Planetarium – Uncharted@Kidus Hailesilassie | Credits: Kidus Hailesilassie
Black Planetarium – Uncharted@Kidus Hailesilassie | Credits: Kidus Hailesilassie
Black Planetarium – Uncharted@Kidus Hailesilassie | Credits: Kidus Hailesilassie
Black Planetarium – Uncharted@Kidus Hailesilassie | Credits: Kidus Hailesilassie
Black Planetarium – Uncharted@Kidus Hailesilassie | Credits: Kidus Hailesilassie
Ancestral Algorithm@Kidus Hailesilassie | Credits: Kidus Hailesilassie
Ancestral Algorithm@Kidus Hailesilassie | Credits: Kidus Hailesilassie
Black Planetarium – Uncharted: Anthologies Across the Atlantic is a cosmic performance installation inspired by 5,000 years of knowledge generation from the continent of Africa.
Meticulously developed since 2020 as part of the project Black Planetarium, Uncharted: Anthologies Across the Atlantic is conceived as a nonlinear, multimodal, collaborative experience—where ancestral knowledge, speculative storytelling, cartography, and performance converge.
It is shaped by Kidus Hailesilassie’s earlier cartographic large-scale installation, Ancestral Algorithm (2019–2023), which collected, digitized, and mapped over 6,500 pictographs, ideographs, syllabaries, alphabets, and iconographs from twenty African languages. Using a combination of custom workflows, pirated AI tools, machine vision, and crowd-sourced spatial-sonic computation, it weaves these knowledge systems into a cosmic performance inspired by Adowa—a dance practiced by the Ashanti community in Ghana, where the body’s movements narrate a story.
It is a collaboration between Kidus Hailesilassie, an Ethiopian artist, architect, and futurist, and Ghanaian choreographer and cultural producer Elisabeth Efua Sutherland. At its core, Uncharted: Anthologies Across the Atlantic moves through the method of critical fabulation—mapping different forms of collective consciousness across the continent and its diaspora. Through this process, the body becomes an archive, centering oral expression that moves beyond writing systems and creating a vessel for ancestral storytelling.
It is both a physical and virtual platform that bridges the continent and its diaspora, the past and the future, and the material with the ephemeral. Uncharted revisits the legacy of African resistance, amplifying alternative decolonial knowledge generation and embodying the ethos of Afro-Surrealism—as a lens for reimagining collective futures.
Created by: Kidus Hailesilassie
Choreography: Elisabeth Efua Sutherland
Performance: Harmony Adams
Filming and production collaborator: Ainslee Alem Robson
Producer: Liam Young, Kidus Hailesilassie, Ainslee Alem Robson
Executive producer for Black Public Media: Lisa Osborne
Immersive producer: Aja Quinn Evans
Creative direction and production design: Kidus Hailesilassie
Visual effects simulation: Jann Frederik Reuter
Compositing: Xu Yuxing, Hongwon Suh
Sound design: Paul Gladstone Reid
Director of photography: Sam Jiahao Zhang
Steadicam operator: Dae Hyun Kim
Gaffer: Haley Kreofsky
1st AC: Jo Zhou
Makeup artist: Natou Fall
Stylist: Eva Wu Huang
Production assistant: Mari Curti, Production Assistant: Meriam Lahlou, Ina Chen
Special thanks: Sarah Wolozin, Rashin Fahandej, Jazia Hammoudi, Keisha N. Knight, Abby Sun, SCI-Arc, International Documentary Association (IDA), Black Public Media and the MIT Open Documentary Lab
Kidus Hailesilassie (ET) is an Ethiopian spatial artist and futurist whose work bridges cartography, physical installation, and film. Drawing on his background in architecture, he explores spatial improvisation rooted in Afro-diasporic and Black expressive modalities. His practice engages themes of collective memory and speculative futures. Kidus is a 2023/2024 Pare Lorentz Grantees and International Documentary Association (IDA) Fellow, a 2022–2024 Artist-in-Residence at Black Public Media and the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and ONASSIS,ONX artist since 2022. His work has been featured internationally at institutions and festivals including MIT, Cornell University, the Venice Architecture Biennale, African Future Institute, Venice Film Festival, Contemporary And (C&), Sundance, among others.
Black Planetarium – Uncharted: Anthologies Across the Atlantic features an immersive dance performance, one that is layered with several forms. The premise of the performance centers the body as an archive, and in fact the project was conceptualized as a reimagination of the architecture of existing archives, such as museums. In the case of this performance, the body is an archive featuring Adowa, a type of dance performed by the Ashanti people of Ghana where the body movements narrate a story. The dance choreography is set in the midst of a cluster of over 6,500 characters from African and diasporic writing systems, in motion, suspended in the space. These characters are a nod to the fact that African languages make up one third of the world's languages, are systems of knowledge generation, represent ancestral stories relating to the continent, and are spiritually connected to the African diaspora. The work in documenting these characters has been ongoing since 2020, it has involved collecting fragments of pictographs, ideographs, and syllabaries from historical records such as books, calendars, and paintings as well as building upon the works of Saki Mafundikwa in his book African Alphabets. Uncharted reimagines archives as an experience of embodied collective memories in a virtual space.