Christian Nyampeta

Director’s Notes is a modular playlist exploring the ideas behind Carnets d’Amérique, a fictional film about an African writer visiting New York on a book tour, leading to adventures and encounters with collaborators, authorities, institutions, and libraries.

In a fictional situation, three artist friends debate how to spend one of their few remaining Saturday nights in New York. Interpreted by artist and documentary filmmaker Maliyamungu Gift Muhande, artist and researcher Akeema-Zane, and Christian Nyampeta, their dialogue is centered around life’s little annoyances in the face of a world ablaze with unjust wars and cruel exterminations. Through improvisation and collaboration with theater maker and director Adrian Alea, their conversation draws from the works and ideas of Black and African writers and film makers who reflected on exile, social life, and urgent cultural action in the society of their time.

The film features an unusual group of friends who gather to watch and critique films made by Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist in the Congo between 1948 and 1952. Their discussion highlights enduring tensions surrounding social transformation, cultural property, and who has the right to representation.

The work emerged from time spent by the two filmmakers in Senegal after the postponement of Dak’Art Biennial in 2024. Taking inspiration from the celebrated poem “Spirits” by Birago Diop, which asserts that “the dead are not really dead,” the work presents scenes from the daily life of the Senegalese capital and invites us to “listen more often to things than beings.” In so doing, it develops the question posed by the poem: at what point in history and from what level of political, artistic, or spiritual impact does an ancestor escape their descendants to become the ancestor of all? Whispers offers reflections on the bonds that extend beyond a single lifetime into a distant future.