ZAM

ZAM is a digital Black archive where visual poetry, history, and music collide to challenge the past and envision the future.

ZAM is a digital Black archive where visual poetry, history, and music collide to challenge the past and envision the future. Developed through the B2 Creative Residency at the ATLAS Institute, ZAM is part installation, part ritual DJ performance, and part strategy video game. It invites visitors to step inside a living, flickering memory engine that listens, speaks back, and refuses to let Black life be erased.

Inside a 360-degree field of projection, chopped and screwed images of Black life loop and fracture around the audience while motion sensors and sound respond to where bodies move in the room. Sight, sound, and atmosphere work together so that all senses are engaged, and the black box behaves less like a static exhibit and more like a living, listening organism.

At the heart of this experience is Nommo, an in-game Oracle who guides initiates through the halls of the archive, offering poetic counsel and tactical prompts. Through Nommo, each visitor carves a one-of-a-kind path through history, blurring the line between archive, divination, and video game.

Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, ZAM moves between what is recorded and what is missing, stitching together documents, rumor, memory, and myth. It is a technology of remembering and an experiment in how art, sound, and speculative narrative can help us navigate the dangerous present and sketch survivable futures. Above all, ZAM asks how we might move differently, individually, and collectively, once we have walked inside the archive and felt it looking back.