Blue Nile Stories
About the project
A multilingual digital museum about the river, memory and Sudanese identity, which I created and designed within the research and arts project AQUAMUSE.
Blue Nile Stories / Sudan is one of the projects of AQUAMUSE, a research and arts project that ran for nearly three years with the support of IHE Delft. It brought together communities, researchers and artists from India, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia to rethink colonial narratives around water and to put local knowledge, memories and lived experience first.
Within this framework, the museum explores how the river, memory and Sudanese identity are bound together, in three very different places: Damazin in Blue Nile State; Tuti Island, where the Blue and White Nile meet in Khartoum; and northern Sudan, around Meroë and Abri.
As creator and designer, I worked closely with the researchers and partners on the creative and narrative concept, the art direction and the visual and digital experience of the museum, turning research material and oral histories into one storytelling experience across many forms.
What the project made
- Short animated films based on stories by leading Sudanese writers, about the river in myth, folklore and oral tradition.
- Short documentaries with people from each region, about their own stories, memories and ties to the river.
- An interactive photo exhibition that brings together photographers working with the river across Sudan.
- The multilingual digital museum itself, joining film, animation, photography, oral history and archive material in one interactive experience.
Some of the Sudan stories on the museum's map