Natasha Khanyola, winner of IDFA DocLab Spotlight Award

Created in 2016, DLA is the first platform dedicated to creative content (immersive realities, video game, animation, music, digital art) linked with innovation in Africa. The very idea of DLA is to incubate emerging talent by offering them a springboard to fast track their projects development with the support and expertise of DLA creative industries ecosystem in France and in Sub-Saharan African countries. After close consideration of all participants who took part in DLA’s 2023 XR Cohort, the curatorial teams at IDFA DocLab and Fak’ugesi together decided to select Khanyola as the first recipient of the award.

“We are excited to work together with Fak’ugesi and DLA to support Natasha Khanyola in attending IDFA. When considering candidates for this award, we were struck by her fresh approach to technology and how clearly Natasha outlined her research and challenges that might come her way as she sets out to develop her work further. She is an inspiring young artist and we feel attending our program and industry activities can be a great next step in her artistic practice and for making new connections within the international industry attending IDFA DocLab,” says Caspar Sonnen, Head of New Media at IDFA.

Eduardo Cachuco, Creative Director of Fak’ugesi and DLA, says: "Digital Lab Africa and the Fak'ugesi Festival could not be prouder to be collaborating with the IDFA Doc Lab for this Spotlight Award. Our collaboration has been aligned with a shared vision in promoting rising stars from the countries of Africa to experience the dynamic IDFA Doc Lab. We believe that this experience will aid in our goals of internationalizing digital creative talent from Africa through in-person experiences that open up future opportunities."

The IDFA DocLab Spotlight Award provides the winner with travel and stay in Amsterdam during IDFA 2023, a festival accreditation that allows her to attend the full IDFA DocLab program, the DocLab R&D Summit, as well as observer access to the DocLab Forum market.

With a background in engineering and design, Khanyola turned to VR and game development, recognizing the potential of gamification in addressing mental health challenges. She is actively working on a video game related to mental illness as a personal and potentially therapeutic endeavor.

"I'm somebody who had struggled with my mental health on and off for a very long time," she says. “One of the things that can be very discouraging with therapy is when you theoretically know what you're supposed to do, like when having a panic attack, but in the moment, your emotions and your mental state are so overwhelming that you just can't do it. And then you feel like you have failed at therapy. But gaming encourages failure because after you lose it, it resets, and you can start over. This was for me just the pivotal thing."

As the game remains a work in progress, Khanyola plans to enhance gameplay elements and consult with psychiatrists to establish a robust foundation for its development.

Her other project in development is Mindscapes, initially conceived as a 360 documentary about the experience of mental illness. But after getting into VR, and especially after seeing Barry Gene Murphy and May Abdalla's award-winning immersive piece Goliath VR, she was inspired to expand it into a spatial interactive environment.

"I'm looking at interviewing a few people to ask them how they perceive their own struggles with their mental health, and how they could put it in a spatial medium," she explains. "I will record that audio and then create the space as a CGI experience, to allow for abstraction. When I was looking at my own brain, I realized it has multiple trains of thought happening at any given point in time and so there's a lot of oddities and quirks that I feel like would work better as CG imagery."

The idea is that the user enters this VR environment with controllers, moves through the space and enter various pockets of this world where the interviewee tells them what it means to them and how they feel about it.

"You're not just stuck watching a film, you actually get to interact with this person's mindscapes. So it's a little piece of world that you get to walk around in and get to walk maybe ten meters in somebody else's shoes," she explains.

One of the projects Khanyola worked on was Naitiemu Nyanjom's Enkang’ang’, an immersive experience that explores Maasai female culture and heritage

"There are many African artists and VR Companies that are focusing on the preservation of cultural heritage and the intersection of cultural heritage and artistic expression. Along with the preservation of culture, there is also an element of escapism and Afrofuturism. With the whole Metaverse thing many African creatives want to get in on it. And they want Africa to be part of the inception of the universe and not just tacked on at the end, like with a lot of waves of technology. So there's been a lot of pride there, a lot of ownership, a lot of agency, a lot of people coming up and trying to use the space to tell their stories as much as possible, " she explains

As for her participation in IDFA DocLab, Khanyola says she is hoping to learn and see other people's creative practices and get a chance to evolve through collaboration and interaction

"This is going to sound cheesy, but I really love people. I love how people think, and getting to know people from around the world, getting to understand how they think about various issues and creative elements. This feels like a great opportunity to do that on an international scale, outside of my own comfort zone. And I'm looking forward to that to the interaction and the potential for collaboration."