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Project: Next of Kin

a transmedia, time-traveling ethnography exploring ancestry, emotional inheritance, and cultural belonging

🧭 🎥 🎬

Project: Next-of-Kin is A creative reckoning with the inheritance we never asked for…

- the systems, the silences, the stories that shaped who we were allowed to become.

This is not a history project.
This our story

And it’s a quiet rebellion against what we've been told - the narratives of kings and wars, power and patriarchy;

his narrative written over her reality.

It’s an opportunity to sweep worlds of dust brushed under the carpet. 🧹

To understand the ways the tapestry’s are woven. ♾️

To uncover and release patterns of the past and give voice to the lives left unspoken.

Who gets to be remembered? Who does the archive serve? What have we inherited beyond DNA?

shame? secrecy? fears? resilience?

—It is about honouring the forgotten, the silenced and the erased. Everyday Kin whose lives shaped who we are.

Because we are all connected.
I am planning an Ancestral Pilgrimage.

The First Chapter: A Poetic Cinematic Essay

I'm creating a feature-length hybrid art film that defies easy categorisation. It's part pilgrimage, part protest, part love letter to the ordinary people whose lives were collateral damage in someone else's power game.

This film will blend:

· Original Spoken Word - the poetry of resistance and remembrance

· Archival Footage - seeing through the official story to the human truth beneath

· Sensory Immersion - walking the same ground, feeling the same rain, understanding through the body what records cannot capture

· Unflinching Research - from bastardy laws to displacement, examining the systems that shaped our ancestors' choices

This is history through the eyes of the kin - the mothers, the workers, the ones who built this world with their hands while others built narratives with their power.

At its heart, this project is about bringing light to what was buried—so that something new can grow. The tone is grounded and mythic, personal and universal. It invites audiences to reflect on where they come from and what they carry—not with judgement, but with compassion and curiosity.

Sweet Caroline - The Time Travelling Caravan Studio

Part documentary, part poetic invocation;

Part Investigation
Why This Matters Now

We live in the echo of these systems. The same power structures that separated my great-grandmother from her child, that sent my great-uncles to die in foreign wars, that decided which stories were worth preserving - they're still here. Just better dressed.

Our failed relationships, our secret shames, our longing for community - these aren't personal failures. They're collateral damage in a system designed to keep us isolated, consuming, and compliant.

But we carry other inheritances too: the resilience of women who raised children alone, the solidarity of communities that shared what little they had, the quiet determination to leave something better for those who would come after.

This is our story to reclaim.
CREATED BY
Stephanie Cobban