The Lion's Historian is a storytelling project that aims to bring forward narratives that have long been silenced, forgotten, or hidden beneath dominant historical accounts. At its heart, the project is about shifting perspectives: moving away from the Eurocentric frameworks through which colonial histories have often been told, and instead creating space for other voices, other memories, and other ways of knowing.

Using the crankie box, a traditional wooden storytelling device with scrolls of illustrated paper, we revisit histories we think we know, but only partially. By reanimating these fragments, the crankie box becomes a medium through which overlooked or marginalized perspectives emerge, offering a visual and narrative counterpoint to the stories that have been preserved and celebrated in official archives.

In a moment when democratic values and plural voices are under pressure worldwide, the project insists on the urgency of empathy as both a method and an outcome. To listen deeply to histories of others, to recognize wounds as well as resilience, is to acknowledge our shared responsibility in shaping societies that are more just and inclusive. Storytelling, here, is not only a cultural act, it is a democratic practice, one that allows us to imagine different futures by learning from the past.

This project unfolds in collaboration with institutions whose collections and legacies are deeply intertwined with colonial histories. The plan is to present The Lion's Historian with one central story as a starting point, while the partner institutions will develop their own crankie projects based on other untold narratives from their collections. Through workshops, co-curation, and shared storytelling, each institution will be left with a crankie box and the tools to create their own stories. The project will later compile these individual stories, offering a broader reflection on overlooked perspectives. In this way, the project becomes a dynamic, collaborative process: an artistic experiment, a gesture of repair, and a platform for empathy, dialogue, and the rebalancing of historical narratives.