Directing
"Conakry" is a homage to the Guinean-Bissauan and Cape Verdean anti-colonial leader Amílcar Cabral. This poetic film is a single shot 16mm film staged at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and based on the archival images. The film-maker Filipa César, invited the Portuguese writer and artist Grada Kilomba and the American radio activist Diana McCarty to reflect on the images and their history, questioning what these film archive mean in a post-African liberation world.
Retelling of the Greek myth. Grada Kilomba's 'Narcissus and Echo' is a metaphor for a society which has yet to resolve its colonial past and is incapable of seeing beyond its own reflection. The rereading can be seen as an incisive analysis on the history of a system of distortion and exclusion.
With the written word as the only visual element, Grada Kilomba gives a voice to an individual who has been historically silenced by colonial narratives. "In this experimental video," the artist states, "I explore how thoughts can be associated not only with theory, but especially with sounds, movement and emotions."
Retelling of the Greek myth. Grada Kilomba's 'Oedipus' tells a story about violence, exploring the role that fate can play for those who live in a system that reproduces cyclical oppression.
An exploration of everyday racism reveals how much this places the black subject in a colonial setting where they once again are reduced to the subordinate, exotic 'Other'. Racism allows the past to suddenly line up with the present, and the present is experienced as if one were being catapulted back into that painful past.
Retelling of the Greek myth. Grada Kilomba's 'Antigone' relates a story of resistance and justice, told from a black feminist perspective, in which the protagonist rebels against the colonial patriarchal system to bury her brother, transforming the burial into a political act against the oblivion of faces and reminding the spectator of the exploitation and death of black workers in colonial plantations.
A theatre reading about the Maji Maji uprising in the former German East Africa reveals that colonial, racist patterns of thought still dominate in Germany today. Philippa Ébené, Grada Kilomba and others linked to the production all get to have their say.
