Live exhibit photos by Jefferey Johnston.

London-based artist Vince Fraser, simply put, creates visionary portals with his art. Ancestral Odyssey: African Diaspora Futures is no exception to this magic. Fraser’s Afrofuturism installation, which opened this June at the New Orleans African American Museum, presents an immersive, multi-sensory vessel, plunging attendees into soundscapes and digital “portals” that symbolize the thresholds between the physical and metaphysical. Using photorealism and blending traditional African symbols with futuristic motifs, Fraser has created spaces where past, present and future realms coexist.

While physically inside the Ancestral Odyssey experience, a person gets so caught up in the morphing, mirrored, poetry-infused, trancelike time travel of it all, that it’s easy to forget you are standing inside a technically complicated and painstakingly fabricated room –– a portal in its own right.

Bringing Bold Ideas to Life

From the beginning, our team was excited about the unique challenges of this build. Not only were we to fabricate two separate rooms within a single room inside the museum, but those two art “vessels” would also be heavily tech-integrated with visuals, light and sound.

With Fraser’s bold, innovative art at the heart of this project, our artists at Downtown FabWorks were tasked with actualizing the physical environment he and his team dreamed up to house his creations and present them to his audiences.

The Vision

The back wall of each space hosts LED screens upon which Fraser’s digitized art lives and breathes. Meanwhile, drum beats dance around powerful spoken word by poet Sunni Patterson, piped into both rooms simultaneously. The effect is two separate vessels, each with its own unique visuals, but tied together into one experience via a shared soundscape.

Then comes another piece of kaleidascopic magic: all surfaces not dedicated to the art itself are reflective - an intended function of the art as an experience. Viewers are able to see themselves and the art reflected as one, as fluid within time and space, as all-encompassing.

“Practicing” Reality

After the collaborative design stage, we performed a “tech up” of the two rooms at our shop: an important step of our process where we do a practice run, fully fabricating the spaces then testing and troubleshooting to make sure the custom-designed structures and integrated tech work the way they should. We then carefully broke it down, flat-packed the entire exhibit, and shipped it to the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans.

Spatial Solutions

The final step (and perhaps the most complicated) was building both vessels in their permanent, side-by-side home inside NOAAM. Not only did we need to fit two differently-shaped rooms into one slightly larger room, but we were now working inside of a historical house-turned-museum instead of our much larger shop.

This step is where fabricators are frequently reminded that limited space requires creative solutions. Luckily, Project Lead Skip Stander came up with an elegant setup to fit all elements of the exhibition into their environment. He incorporated a hidden panel inside one of the rooms for easy access, and turned the channel between the two "vessels" into a control hub for all the AV + lighting. This stroke of genius brought the whole thing together.

Magical Results

From deftly calculating the geometry of the kaleidoscope room, to working out every little tech integration detail, to fitting an artist’s grand vision into its relatively small home, there are aspects of this build that are unlike anything we’ve ever done.

Project Manager Alyssa Devine speaks about this journey as a series of ah-ha moments. “The biggest ‘light bulb’ came the moment everything was all in place and literally turned on – it was rather striking to see everything finally lit up…and very rewarding.”

To experience Ancestral Odyssey is to be swept away into Vince Fraser’s dream. And we are so proud that we had the privilege of collaborating with him, curator and NOAAM director Gia Hamilton, and all the teams that made this important story a reality –– one that people can literally step into, feel, and become a part of. That’s the magic of experiential fabrication at its best.

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Good fabrication should be a “portal” for other people’s voices and storytelling, and we can’t wait to build a conduit for your next vision! Get in touch today – let’s make some magic happen.