Villa Africana Colobó Garden is an Immersive AR/VR Documentary and Community Media project. It will consist of web-based Virtual Tours, where viewers can explore an urban garden in the West Kensington neighborhood in North Philadelphia and the oral histories of the Latine community that lives here. The process will include intergenerational media workshops in which long-term residents receive media training and create connections with each other.
In the early ’80s, “Grupo Motivos,” a group of Puerto Rican women in North Philadelphia, were tired of seeing their children and communities being exposed to daily drug dealings, gun violence, abandoned houses, and trashed vacant lots. They started occupying and cleaning the vacant lots. This project is about Iris Brown, one of the founders of Grupo Motivos, and her vision for Villa Africana Colobo, a garden that celebrates the African heritage and the West African diaspora in Puerto Rican culture. Today, these gardens are maintained by the Norris Square Neighborhood Project and continue to be a gathering place and source of community pride.
Through music, poetry, food and dance, the project will document the urban gardens that celebrate African roots and African heritage in Puerto Rico, the U.S. and Africa. We will hear stories of migration, color prejudice and reclaiming heritage. By sharing these stories, the project will build bridges across generations and across cultures.
There is an urgent need to preserve these community stories and memories, to assert the neighborhood’s beauty and power as forces of reinvestment, gentrification, and change come to the community. We want to use the immersive technologies of VR and AR to create an engaging way that people can learn about and share the life of this neighborhood and to do it in a way that reflects the power of the community. When you start getting people together to make art, they also can get together to create change.
Directors: Anula Shetty, Iris Brown, and Michael Kuetemeyer
Created in collaboration with Norris Square Neighborhood Project
