EMILY PHILA ALLINGHAM
Wonk-i (2025),
Women’s Game Jam
is a 2D side-scrolling adventure where players take on the role of a Wonky Robot, a robot searching for belonging in a world that has left it behind. Travel through strange, neon lit cities on a journey towards Robot City. A sanctuary for forgotten robots; promising safety, purpose and a second chance at life. Along the way, face off against hostile high-tech enemies: glitching, misshapen machines that speak in unreadable binary and will stop at nothing to halt your progress. Battle your way through flying clocks with whirring hands or robotic crab enemies and discover whether Robot City truly is the haven it claims to be.
Inkumbi (2023)
is an interactive, story-driven videogame that invites players into a first-person digital environment inhabited by birds, insects, ships and narratives drawn from my isiXhosa oral history. Developed as a means of reconnecting with my Makhulu (grandmother), the work was a way to draw on stories told to me by my mother and before her, her mother. Inkumbi was a means to piece together erased aspects of my isiXhosa lineage, exploring how digital space can function as an ancestral site where memory, narrative and identity intersect. Using a point-and-click structure the game encouraging players not to master the environment but to listen attentively. Through encounters with helmeted guineafowls, red locusts, Makhulu’s and guavas, players engage with texture, colour and form, allowing stories to unfold through interaction.
Man Overboard (2021)
is a mixed-media exhibition consisting of video, sculpture and drawing that investigates nautical navigational signals as metaphors for communication, survival and orientation within post-apartheid South Africa. Growing up as a black–white woman, I have continually had to navigate social and historical obstacles, often relying on visual signals to guide me through an uncharted environment. The exhibition became a way of communicating with my father, bridging my English heritage and African identity through a shared visual language. Drawing on nautical navigational signals which is rooted in systems of colour, geometry, number and light designed to bridge linguistic barriers at sea. I appropriate their codes of distress and coordination to explore themes of visibility, miscommunication and urgency. By spray-painting these signals onto plastic drapery and sewing them together into an abstracted tapestry, their original meanings are rendered obsolete; yet their heightened colours and forms continue to signal emergency without resolution. Through this abstracted tapestry, the work reflects on lineage, patriarchy, colonial legacies, and the histories of bodies moving across water that have shaped the Cape.
