History is a life teacher, but its cruel lessons often fall on increasingly deaf ears. An increasing temporal distance from a historic event will inevitably push it into the domain of academic interest of the chosen few. Mati Kochavi, an Israeli-American entrepreneur and technological pioneer, wants to change this iron law into a pure narrative gold for both the mainstream audience and the academic specialists. Enter Equiano.Stories, a tale of the marriage of modern technology and living history with an ambition to change the present and, more importantly, the future.
Eva.Stories, Kochavi’s Instagram sensation and a media darling from 2019, has got its spiritual successor – Equiano.Stories. A story of the tragic fate of Eva Heyman, a 13-year-old Hungarian girl who perished in the Holocaust, was viewed by the millions and crowned with two Webby awards. Now, Kochavi and his daughters Adi and Maya want to repeat the same success and retell yet another real-life story on its protagonist’s Instagram account.
This time, the Kochavis’ production team takes us further back into the past, but no brighter one for that matter. Olaudah Equiano is a young West African boy who was kidnapped, enslaved, and transported to the colonial Caribbean in the 18th century, only to become a prominent abolitionist and writer in the U.K. following his release from slavery.
Once again, Equiano’s story will be told in a series of his personal Instagram posts (videos, stills) which, despite their “fictional” nature, have a truthful ring to them since Kochavi has secured assistance from a team of historians and experts of slavery for this project. Everything the viewers can see in these posts was realistically recreated down to the tiniest detail, from Equiano’s careless days in an idyllic village to his ordeal on the slave ship and subsequent forced labor.
While Equiano’s Instagram stories will be presented with the help of a team of professional actors and a Hollywood-like level of production values, the basic narrative about a boy whose tragic fate is both a historical account and a warning for the future which remains true to its historic sources.
Once again, there are some voices who want to criticize this approach to speaking of historical traumas, quoting the supposed unsuitability of the social media platforms such as Instagram to convey the scope of the tragedy and its century-wide echo. Fortunately, unlike what happened with Eva.Stories, the voices of the opposition are in the minority now. For Kochavi, this is proof that it’s the story of this minor opposition that doesn’t deserve retelling, as the trite old arguments about why technology is bad in itself have always followed the wheels of progress.
Instead of this, Kochavi’s project has already started to draw the droves of positive comments, both from the viewers themselves, and the institutions such as Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History, the oldest independent museum of Black history in the USA.
Why is it that Kochavi seems to have hit yet another home run with his unique artistic approach? The answer is surprisingly simple – one truly universal human need is to tell and absorb stories. With this mission stated even in the title of this project, you can say that Mati Kochavi has simply scratched that unending itch with a touch of technological magic and an honest vision of uniquely human universal truths.
