"Where are you from ?" - Pecha Kucha night - Stoke-on-Trent 2010

Pecha Kucha is a Japanese concept for a slide show presentation of 20 slides with 20seconds per slide.
For my presentation I wanted to show images from a project I had been working at, a couple of years ago, without reaching the final stage. I introduced it as "the journey through my own story within the bigger frame of History and how this has shaped my  identity in some unexpected ways".

listen to a live track of the night : BBC Stoke

I wasn't quite satisfied with the presentation itself as it would have taken much more preparation to obtain the result I was looking for but I had very good feed-backs that were telling me that I was on the right tracks.

I find the slide show + voice-over/comments very interesting as a format because 2 parallel discourses/stories can be told : the one of the images and the one of the voice over. I like the ambiguities such a situation can create and I would like to work at it in the form of a short movie.



images : Mark Brereton

This work very autobiographical. It focuses on my physical features and the fact that lots of people think that I have some African heritage. It is a kind of mystery that would certainly be explained if I could do a genealogical research . My father also has some African, North African features.
The story takes another dimension when I look at my city as it has been built with the money of the slavery trade and it goes on a more personal level as I married an African man with whom I had two children ....

Here are the slides ...



















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