For me, the films represent a warning to the West about its negligence, ignorance, mythical approach to history, omission of the histories and legacies of empire, slavery and colonization, and how those things affect the way that we live today: the way that Black people are still disenfranchised. They’re a stark warning that the West will undo itself as a result of the lies it has celebrated, taught, and disseminated for a while. It’s almost as if it will eat itself unless an understanding of the truth—or what has not been allowed to be revealed as the truth—is opened up. Something like Brexit is only possible because the UK, the powers that be, and the media have propagated myths for so long regarding the idea of the “other,” the foreigner, and the so-called independence and strength of the United Kingdom or the West, without recognizing the resources and contributions [of colonized and oppressed people]—voluntary and otherwise—that make these nations so apparently great.

I was inspired by practitioners in different fields, including film, art, and music: Ousmane Sembène, John Akomfrah and Smoking Dogs Films, Nnedi Okorafor, Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto, Adrian Piper, John Carpenter, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nina Simone, Christy Azuma & Uppers International.

I am interested in building stories that do not fit the usual, tested sci-fi format of the white male archetype who is going to save the planet. Over the years I’ve had conversations with friends or family members after we’ve come out of a film where we’ve detailed how, typically, African or Black characters are done a disservice. If we think about Blade Runner, for example, whiteness is front and center, and anything that is not whiteness simply becomes part of the periphery or the backdrop. For the Relic Traveller films, I was thinking about creating heroes who looked like myself—our heroes, who are African and Black, are exploring these mostly Western environments, where the West becomes exotic. It’s something I intend to open up further as my practice develops, and have experimented with previously in films like Sunday’s Best and The Expulsion. For me it’s about illuminating the types of experiences that haven’t been given breathing space before. And the multitudes of Relic Travellers that exist in the films are part of that process of creating different, complex narratives. Initially I wrote these characters for my son and daughter to play. My daughter at the time was way too young to put on a MiG pilot costume! But I wanted to build stories that they and others could believe in, or feel like they had a place or an active investment in.

The process of writing is probably the part that takes the longest for me. It becomes a space for emptying thoughts, feelings, and words, and a place of constructing new landscapes out of them, or breaking them down, only to rebuild. Along the way, I imagine voices that could work with the words. Most of the voices in my film are not those of people who are trained actors but of people I know or know of. Through doing multiple takes with the recording artists and allowing space, I’m able to build nuance. That process is quite long, but it’s necessary in order to capture the type of energy that you need when hearing and feeling a set of stories and experiences.

I never formally learned to create or produce sounds; it’s just something I’ve built an interest in, drawing upon various aspects of pop culture. I’ve been influenced by my uncle, a DJ who would play high-life music and mix it with Western hip-hop or R&B at a time when that was not being done. And I’m also influenced by having been around people who create garage and grime beats. I developed an interest in bedroom music production, which is quite similar to how I work now. I don’t have loads of equipment, but I have a couple of hardware synths, and I’ve used the Akai Music Production Center, a piece of technology responsible for incredible hip-hop and house sounds. I started working with samples from my parents’ record collection and have created a few beat tapes from that. But more and more in my filmmaking I’m entering the realm of just evolving sounds, and having jam sessions with myself. I won’t sit at the synthesizer and think “this sound needs to be heavy or dark”; I’ll create a series of riffs, build those stems, and layer on top of them—build on the energy. There’s an artistry to it, but I’m also interested in creating a cool kind of groove, so that whoever listens to it wants to maybe listen to it again, potentially outside the film. All of these things—the narrative, the structures of the visual and audible landscapes—conjure up their own set of spirits and characters that make an important piece of the larger pie. Sound is such a big deal to me.