To Join The Stars

To Join The Stars is a video art project by Hakeem Adam which seeks to use filmic language and sound art to create a narrative around the institution of death in a pre-colonial Ghanaian setup, examining the dissociation of the body and the soul as form of time travel. The film seeks not to celebrate life or mourn death but to visually portray the journey, from the perspectives of the body and the soul. The film is inspired by eroding funeral cultures in northern Ghana by paying homage to these existing cultures as a way of prompting a rethinking and relearning of these vanishing traditional. Burial practices among the Konkomba, Frafra, Talensi and Sisala culture are the main research material for the film as the project very deliberately dissociates Christian and Islamic funeral rites from the traditional rituals. The film seeks to make death intimate as opposed to its structure as a communal and public event. Additionally, sound art is used to center the narrative as a collection of audio clips from space (gathered by NASA) are engineered using sound design/art to drive the narrative of the piece.

Single channel color video with stereo sound. 2018