Excerpts from Neyinka and the Silver Gong, 2024. Full video available on request
Neyinka and the Silver Gong, 2024
Historical films like Braveheart paint a completely white, completely virtuous picture of precolonial Scotland. This is beautifully disrupted by the 9th century records of the fir gorma. The Old Irish term for Black people, ‘fir gorma’, directly translates as ‘blue men’. References to fir gorma in ancient Irish chronicles are thought by historians and folklorists to refer to North African people enslaved by Vikings in the 9th century and brought to Ireland and the Scottish Hebrides. As a Black English woman living in Scotland, I’m interested in how this displaced community might have constructed their own Scottish identity.
After speculating that some fir gorma escaped captivity, fled to an uncharted Scottish island, and formed a clan, my work has taken the form of an extended trailer for a fir gorma fantasy blockbuster. It atmospherically draws on the rousing, melodramatic, trailer for Braveheart and its depiction of blue-painted warriors, symbolically connecting the blue people to favourable traits of courage, honour, and chivalric romance. I’m interested in film trailers as analogies for nationalistic self-mythologising - cherrypicking the most enticing parts of a film, or a national history, to construct the most enticing self-image.
Using over-sentimental, absurdly jingoistic performance to camera, I hope to challenge the supposed newness of the Black presence in Scotland. By hypervisibly layering greenscreen and camcorder footage, revealing the construction of the trailer, I'm considering the artificially layered construction of national identity. This also references the jarring visual effects common in Nollywood, connecting the blue people to their contemporary African diaspora.
The video interrogates contemporary Scottish identity from a close, but not fully embodied perspective, contributing to wider discourse about the rise of nationalism in Western Europe. This is important in the context of Black Lives Matter when the art world must ask itself which histories it memorialises. This is especially true as we comfortably, warmly, safely witness countless colonialism-fuelled, genocidal atrocities in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and more, as our world leaders allow Black and brown bodies to pile up.
PAF Olomouc 23rd Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art Screening: A—Z: Chronicles. Act 2
In this video I have worked with previous collaborators: actor Laura Lovemore, movement director and dance artist Jessica Paris, and my sister, musician Not Sarah. This is a continuation of my commitment to centring Black women on and off-screen. I play all the film's characters, but with my Southern English accent dubbed over in a mix of Old and New Scots, speaking to the numerous historical anachronisms in Braveheart, and but also questioning notion of what it means to ‘look’ or ‘sound’ Scottish.
The process of filming in rural Scotland while Black - encountering stares, well-meaning questions, and outright suspicion - has anecdotally affirmed widely accepted, narrow visual definitions of Scottishness. But by digitally collaging myself in to beautiful Scottish sceneries filmed with a camcorder, I hope to assert the validity of my presence here. I’m also mutating my own Cameroonian heritage - most notably ceremonial double gongs. Now primarily produced for the tourist market, these ‘authentic’ gongs indiscreetly commodify Cameroonian culture to the wider world, as Braveheart does for Scottish culture.
The video shows the clan redefining traditional African traditions (such as Sande secret society mask ceremonies) in their new Scottish context, mixing tropes from the hero's journey, (in the tradition of high fantasy storytellers like Lewis & Tolkien, whose fantasy lands are startlingly, deliberately white) with references to contemporary Black diaspora such as Lil’ Kim. The Yoruba water deity Yemọja is also prominently featured in the film. This is due to my academic fascination with precolonial West African religious practices, but also a purer childhood fascination with Mami Watas, the Pan-African water spirits who, like Yemoja, take the form of mermaids. The narrative interweaves practices of matriarchy, ancestor worship and queerness that were present in many precolonial African societies, but have been dissolved and demonised through colonial rule.
‘Neyinka and the Silver Gong’, 2024 (stills)
Single-channel video, 24 minutes 30 seconds
Artist, Performer, Writer, Creative Director, Costume Designer, and Director - Kialy Tihngang
Voiceover Artist and Script Consultant - Laura Lovemore
Composer - Not Sarah
Editor and VFX Lead - Molly Neill
Movement Director - Jessica Paris
Producer and Food Designer - Corah Ambrose
Prop Designer - Sophia Cavaluzzi
Prop Assistant - Kate Parker
Nail Artist - Ivy McGoldrick
Embroiderer - Elise Prentice
Puff Puff - Gwafu Vegan
Special thanks to: Eben Dombay Williams, Sebastian Hammani, and Grace Higgins Brown
Filmed at Too Happy Studios and all over Scotland
‘Neyinka and the Silver Gong’ was made as part of ‘fir gorma’ a duo show with Josie KO, for Glasgow International Festival 2024. In ‘fir gorma’ (the 2024 duo show) for Glasgow International Festival, Josie KO was in conversation with Kialy Tihngang, drawing on their contrasting and converging explorations into Black British histories and identities, producing a duo exhibition incorporating film and sculpture. ‘fir gorma’ (the research project) is an ongoing research project created by Josie KO in 2020
This project was supported by Glasgow International, Creative Scotland, Too Happy Studios, the Hari Art Prize, and the Hospitalfield Graduate Programme Residency