Mozambique: Yara Costa wins Forúm Creation Africa award

The award was awarded to Costa for the Nakhodha and the Mermaid project, which was funded by the Music In Africa Foundation’s Sound Connects Fund (SCF). Forúm Creation Africa is designed for African creatives and will see Costa participate in a two-week residence programme in Paris in 2024. The residence will allow her to take her Nakhodha and the Mermaid project abroad and develop it further. Costa will use her time in Paris to have meetings with different French creatives in the French industry.

Nakhodha and the Mermaid is a ground-breaking 33 minutes immersive experience art installation that warns how African coastal populations, who for centuries have lived in harmonious relationship with the sea, are being affected by the consequences of global warming. The project blends sound, sea chants, and traditional ecological knowledge rooted in the Swahili maritime culture heritage of Mozambique, while highlighting the threat of rising sea levels that could destroy coastal communities, cultures and systems of knowledge if global warming continues.

“This award by the French Minister of Culture, was a very positive surprise that I was not expecting,” Costa told Music In Africa. “From conception to execution of the project, it took me about a year and thanks to the SCF grant. It is definitely encouraging and reassuring to see the idea, the intention and all the hard work acknowledged elsewhere, and to gain the opportunity to take it further and develop it further.”

SCF project lead Katlego Taunyane commended Nakhodha and the Mermaid for playing a big role in bridging arts and climate change through technology.

“Nakhodha and the Mermaid is an exciting project for Sounds Connects Fund seeing that it holistically bridges the links of traditional songs, rituals and climate change whilst presenting these through immersive cutting edge technology,” he said. “This allows for the traditional fishermen’s stories not only to be archived but also to be distributed to audiences around the world and facilitate creation of new markets for the local communities and artists.”

Taunyane added: “The Nakhodha and the Mermaid installation has not only garnered significant interest around the globe but has been recognised internationally at the Forúm Creation Africa. This acknowledgment is a testament to the competency and quality that can be delivered by this region of the world. Having a Sound Connects Fund-supported project from a humble African island community recognised at an international level for its use of first-world technology shows the unquestionable value of CCI investments by stakeholders on the continent.”

The Sound Connects Fund is an initiative of the Music In Africa Foundation (MIAF) and Goethe-Institut. It is made possible with funding from the ACP-EU Culture Programme, a project implemented by the Secretariat of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States and funded by the European Union (EU). The fund is also co-funded by Goethe-Institut and Siemens Stiftung.