Through Strategic Storytelling, New World Haven seeks to excavate, illuminate, elevate and activate your dreams for your city.
Join us as we launch at the Stetson Branch Library on Dixwell Ave. 6PM on Nov 20. Sound Cypher, OFFLOAD, follows at the Sandbox – 70 Audubon Ave. Tickets here.
Stories make our reality. Whether the stories we’re told about the place of our birth, the stories of our families, or the stories of our future, we internalize the pathways in these stories as possibilities. These possibilities shape our expectations. These expectations influence our actions. These actions create our reality.
And now, we get to choose…
By telling stories that align with the world we seek to create, we are participating in the art of worldmaking.
New World Haven is funded in part by the Mellon Foundation through the New Haven Arts Council.
“we must stop imagining destruction + extraction + deforestation + cages + torture + displacement + surveillance + genocide! we must stop predicting apocalypses + fascist governments + capitalist hierarchies! we must pursue + predict + imagine routes towards liberation!”
New World Haven will help us choose what stories to tell, and thus what realities we desire to experience. In so doing, the narrative will help to give us a collective imaginary from which to create the most equitable, most thriving New Haven possible for our futures.
By capturing the dreams of the community, and weaving them into a collective narrative, NWHV will help us to collectively visualize an equitable, just, beautiful NHV for all.
New World Haven is an interactive public narrative telling the story of how New Haven became the Silicon Valley for the Arts, a bubbling, equitable smart city where cultural production and cultural producers thrive. New World Haven seeks to answer the question: what would New Haven become if Black and Brown folks had the power to determine that?
The project will include an anime style comic strip published in installments on select digital screens across the city. The screens will allow residents to interact with the narrative, sharing their feedback and which stories they wish to see told.
The New World Haven narrative is an experiment in worldmaking, the act of creating new worlds through a combination of intentional, strategic storytelling and thoughtful, intentional partnerships and collaborations.
This project was seeded through a series of conversations with local ecosystem builders, artists, technologists, activists and other visionaries. It is born from a deep connection with the city held by the project’s initiator, Artist Olori Lolade Siyonbola.
“I have an attachment to this city, always feeling drawn back whenever I travel away. I’ve made this place one of my long term homes because the combination of creative culture, activism and visionary innovation makes me feel right at home.” – Olori Lolade Siyonbola
Alongside the futuristic anime comic, the NWHV project will build an archive of resources, information and data about the city’s rich cultural and activist past.
Much has been written prior to and throughout this project thus far. From the rich reference material found in our research, to the thoughts produced from this research, the NWHV Archive is already rich with history and creativity.
See some of this work below:
