In the twentieth century, physicists (most notably Robert Oppenheimer) worried that physics was extremely alienated from the modes of expression in other sciences and daily life. Physics operates with terminology that seems to make sense in everyday language, and yet, a force, a particle, and other concepts carry alternative meanings within physics, and in particular, within the indeterminate world of quantum.

Today, poetics is recognizably part of the scientific endeavour. Quantum theorizing is a matter of storytelling and, as Donna Haraway’s phrase is often invoked, ‘it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with’. Inspired by the social and cultural significance of the griot, a West African storytelling figure that delivers wisdom of the past in oral form, this poetic offering entangles folklore, embodiment, positionality, and the question of translation and transmission of knowledge in a quantum age. 

The spoken word and storytelling session invites David Odiase and Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan to host and perform together with generated images as a collective embodiment of the griot and other storytellers, archivists, and divinators that exist across geographies and time.