NANIKI (meaning ‘active spirit’ in the Taino language) is a cross-platform story project authored by Oonya Kempadoo, that is published as a Caribbean-futurist novel, Naniki (Rare Machines, Dundurn Press, Toronto, Jan 2024); produced as an immersive and live-performance experience; with preliminary concept development for VR.
naniki imm
ersive
NANIKI IMMERSIVE is a 40-minute Location Based Experience (LBE) in a circular room made of large projection screens, that surrounds its audience with a fantastical and futurist Caribbean Sea storyworld of multimedia (including audiovisual performance); digital art; and live storytelling, carnival-circus performance, and music. Original content includes filmed underwater performance, and with a cast of four (2 circus artists, a storyteller, and live musician), it was presented in Montreal at Concordia University’s Black Box, on March 24-25th, 2023.
Photo credits: Parafilms
the novel
“Time-bending, world-bending, heart-bending, Naniki is truly luminous … a lyrical spiritual Afro-Indigenous epic set in a climate ravaged Caribbean… two elemental beings, Amana and Skelele, must find their way across the present and the past if the world is to have a future. Kempadoo has outdone herself: this is what happens when a book becomes a spell.” — Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Set in the Caribbean Basin, Naniki is a futuristic cross-cultural tale imbued with magic realism.
Winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature 2025, longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction 2025 (US-Canada), selected as one of the five most notable books of 2024 in Canada – Governor General’s Literary Award finalist, CBC Books Best Canadian Fiction of 2024
Full credits for NANIKI IMMERSIVE, written, directed and co-produced by Oonya:
Contact Oonya for more information.
oonya 