Operation Risky

Barbuda, West Indies

By Akiera Charles
information erasure, counter narratives, spatial toxicity, black bodies, pain, sounds, comments, remembering

Operation Risky is an ode to my childhood game, Operation. It's an interactive map that brings attention to the ways we wear our spatial pains.

The goal of my project is to disrupt the informational erasure of Barbuda, as well as, to point the lens of critique back unto the viewer. Everytime the viewer leaves a response the Barbudan individual shown on site gets worse. Instead of appealing to the western savior complex, the functions of this site point a finger at the limitation of suggestions and recommendations without systemic changes. This site hangs onto the physiological experience that happens when recommendations make the individual feel good, but leaves communities of color even more stranded and susceptible to death and spatial traumas. Yeah, this site is rivetingly deep.

Once users press start, they are ushered into the platform. After they see the bare-chested Black man and magnifying glass, the goal is for them to move around (or hover) the magnifying glass onto his body. Similar to the game, Operation, the next steps involve them searching for scars under his body that correlates to the red spatial pains. If users hear a shriek or a grumble, that means they have located the wounded site.

With use of sounds that mirror pain, this site plays with our emotional psyche as we connect pain with placemaking. When users click on the wound, a pop up description will show up to provide more contextual meaning to the wound and the site. Hope you enjoy it.

Akiera is a Parsons’20 alumna of the Design and Urban Ecologies (DUE) Masters of Science program. For her graduate thesis, she focused on the impacts communicative injustices have on landscape resilience in Black “disaster prone” communities. The fieldwork portion of her thesis research takes place in Barbuda, W.I., where she has been partnering with Barbudan-led NGO, BarbudanGO for the past 7 months.