Afrah Shafiq builds worlds from her long-term research and engagement with archives — folklore, embroidery traditions, memory and history — and gives them new life through the language of code, animation, and play. Her hybrid forms traverse text, sound, sculpture, and immersive installation, inviting speculative viewership; her methodology involves re-reading, unpacking and gleaning through existing narratives to unlearn and offer perspectives on knowledge making.
In The Bride Who Could Not Stop Crying, the player is cast inside a character already in grief. Drawing from Slavic bridal embroideries and women’s mourning songs, the game enacts the wedding day as a day of loss, a tradition held in the hands of women, encoded in pattern and repetition, rarely legible to those outside it. In this tradition, a woman spends her life making ritual fabric that will follow her; from her wedding day to her burial shroud, stored in a chest alongside the embroideries of her mother and grandmother. Afrah is driven by the symbolic value of embroidery as an encoded language that awaits deciphering. As the bride moves through her family and the mythical figures living inside the cloth, every choice impacts the tear meter. The player is left wondering what it means to be given a choice, and whether, given that choice, we know how to move through it differently.