Jessica Ashman’s ‘Dawta’ is now online

Watch Jessica Ashman’s arresting audio-visual project Dawta now on Vimeo. The project comprises a single-screen film, a live performance, a documentation video of a performance, and an EP release.

Combining original music and experimental animation techniques, the work explores the idea of inherited cycles of trauma in the Black diaspora, through a time traveller called Dawta. Ultimately, Dawta presents a narrative of escaping the past through the imagining of an unknown future; through the imagining of an unknown hope.

The work is inspired by the work of seminal, Black, science fiction author Octavia E. Butler. In particular, the dystopian novel ‘Parable of the Sower’, which is set in 2024, and her time-travelling novel ‘Kindred’, which was published 45 years ago this month. Archival research into trans-racial adoption and fostering and Ashman’s own family connection to this history are also woven into this Afrofuturist project.

Jessica has crafted the visuals with painted animation, collage, paper cut out, multiplane, pixellation, and digital animation. The music has been composed with drummer and concept artist, Bimpe Alliu, who also accompanied Jessica in the live performance. Both artists become the physical embodiment of the future utopia sisterhood in the live performance, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, animation and performance.

Watch the single-screen film:

And documentation video:

The live performance of Dawta had its premiere at the Flatpack Festival Autumn Edition on 25 September 2021 and was presented at Café OTO in London in February 2022. The single-screen work has screened at Cardiff Animation Festival, British Shorts, London International Animation Festival, Tricky Women, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, and Encounters Festival, amongst others.

Dawta is an audio-visual work by Jessica Ashman, produced by Animate Projects, and supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.