Employing a participatory-co-creative-multimedia methodology, musician, filmmaker, and scholar dr. Cyrus unpacks, Survival—the seminal Bob Marley and The Wailers album. SURVIVAL is delivered as a participatory experience by engaging the attendees as storytellers in a co-creative experience along with multimedia elements such as live music, video, and posters. This methodology allows the story to be unpacked by all present through a creative expression that engages with the conference theme of arts, design and activism in Global Transformations.

SURVIVAL shares why the 47-year-old black archive of sound, music, and Black cultural production and labour, remains greatly relevant in the 21st Century. At once a memorial, a piece of black archive, a call to arms, and a subversive political statement—all necessary elements of an engaging documentary.

Released on October 2, 1979, just nineteen months before his untimely death, Survival remains the most political and militant of Bob Marley’s albums, which was recorded at Tuff Gong Recording Studios in Kingston, Jamaica (also Marley’s home). This professional recording studio also housed a record manufacturing plant, making Marley the first artist in Jamaica to “not only own his own studio but also manufacture his own records,” which allowed for tremendous independence, turning aesthetic work into political action.

From the assertive title to its thematic tracks, the album is a documentary time machine—a container cradling the past, the present and the future of black resistance. Using this container, Marley presented his stories in a way never seen or heard in the reggae genre. On the album cover, Marley’s storytelling is intentional. He tells the story of black survival - of slavery, and how its legacy continues in the present. The deliberate use of the iconic slave-ship diagram in black and white along with the colourful African flags set the tone.