Relic Travellers’ Alliance: Assembly (Standing, Downward Stare) MK 001

‘Relic Travellers’ Alliance: Assembly (Standing, Downward Stare) MK 001’, from the 'Relic Traveller' series by Larry Achiampong, 2022, mixed-media work composed of a flight suit and a high-altitude helmet..

Larry Achiampong’s 'Relic Travellers’ Alliance: Assembly (Standing, Downward Stare) MK 001' is a mixed-media work composed of a high-altitude flight suit and helmet. It is part of Achiampong’s expansive multi-disciplinary project begun in 2017, 'Relic Traveller', in which the British-Ghanaian artist imagines a science fictional postcolonial future.

Drawing upon film, audio, performance and prose, Achiampong conceives a narrative in which the global West has declined and the organisation of African states, the Pan African Union, is flourishing. Among other initiatives, the Pan African Union creates the ‘Relic Travellers’ Alliance’ whose voyagers wear modified hybrid suits and helmets. In the artist’s films, they roam time and space, as if astronauts exploring what the artist describes as ‘landscapes beautifully marred’ by human activity.

The ‘Relic Traveller’ is identified as a member of the Pan African Union by a patch sewn onto their flight suit, representing one of the Pan African flags (2026-71) designed by Achiampong as part of 'Relic Traveller'. The flags’ Pan African colours hold symbolic meaning: green evokes African land, black its people, yellow-gold prosperity, and red the struggles the continent has faced.

According to Achiampong, Relic Travellers are tasked with ‘retrieving testimonies left by ancestors and neighbours oppressed because of colonisation, capitalism and globalisation. These uncovered ‘relics’ are collected and used as a basis for the Pan African Union to responsibly govern the future from a ‘bottom-up perspective’. For Achiampong, this process is deeply associated with his Ghanaian, Akan heritage and his own concept of ‘Sanko-time’. He relates Sanko-Time to the Twi term ‘Sankofa’, which means to go back for what has been left behind, and by extension to reflect on the past, in order to build an understanding of the present, and a better future.