Mojo: Stained & Flooded is a two-channel 3D animated short film depicting a future where America’s landscapes are transformed by Black culture.

The first channel depicts a speculative ecology where a Trap music producer controls an entire watershed through his mixing board. Vast machines operated by music producers hover over a floodplain landscape, using bass notes from amplified music to vibrate bodies of water. Cymatic patterns in the water are used to visually mix and master sound. Spillage from the process irrigates surrounding soil and flora distributed by seed-dropping drones. Through the production of music, the ecological system is sustained and the landscape is transformed.

The second channel follows a sensitive tea master named Demetrius, a member of the Crimson Needles gang that uses colored flora to mark territory. Haunted by the voice of his elder/O.G., Bump, Demetrius relives the memory of being reprimanded for his fascination with a blue plant; forbidden by the red gang to which he belongs. Based in a world where symbiotic relationships with technology allow Black Americans to transform “natural” and synthetic environments, the film is a small glimpse into the intimate life of one of its many inhabitants. Stained imagines an alternative ecology that foregrounds under-explored narratives. It re-frames gang culture as a landscape phenomenon and recasts those affiliated as environmental caretakers and tea makers.

Both animations takes place in the narrative world of Mojo, a fictional future I created as a way of bridging the disparities between the contemporary Black experience and landscape discourse. It is a response to my experience in landscape architecture where we were taught to see, study, and interpret landscapes from a limited point of view. My work embraces the friction and harmony that emerges between the Green agenda (climate activism, environmentalism, ecological study) and the Black experience. In their collision, I mine for new rituals, mythologies, and landscapes that challenge our conventional understanding of “nature” and space.

Created By Jeremy Kamal

Music By Nathan Buttel & Jeremy Kamal

A.i Creative Direction By Case Miller

Additional A.i By Johnathan Penvose