“We are a bunch of teenagers in northern Nigeria trying to change the narrative.” In their own words, changing the narrative is the goal of The Critics Company. Isn’t this what all art is about? Trying to tweak, to further the Narrative? Six boys and three girls from rural Nigeria shooting sci-fi movies on their mobile phones and uploading them to YouTube. With their lo-fi post-production tools, a kid running in the plain can turn into a protagonist trying to evade space villains after him. From the oral tradition of storytelling, sharing stories hasn’t changed much in the millennia. In times when everyone can master the cameras available in mobile devices, making stories has never been easier. This is Generation Z and their TikTok expertise that makes everyone an instant blockbuster director. This is a generation with total agency. Digital media has liberated artistic subjects that would otherwise have been excluded of the mainstream. It is the grassroots of the platform and the guerrilla nature of the medium that make it so easy to short-circuit the entertainment mainstream elite with interventions such as those by The Critics Company. The high and the low, the centre and the periphery. There are no distinctions, and this bunch of kids are the prophets of a new era, changing the narrative of who has ownership of the future and its visions.

Timotheé, 2021
Film, 12’13’’
Courtesy of the artists