USEFUL RESOURCES
USEFUL RESOURCES
PERFORMING GUINEA-BISSAU'S
CINEMA ARCHIVE
We are aiming to build a varied list of publications, websites and opportunities for artists.
This is the beginning and we welcome your suggestions via email to theceraproject@gmail.com
Filipa César, Cacheu (2012). © Filipa César, Courtesy Cristina Guerra Contemporary and the artist.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Filipa César
Is an artist and filmmaker interested in the porous boundaries between the moving image and its reception, the fictional dimensions of the documentary and the economies, politics and poetics inherent to cinema praxis. Great part of Cesar's experimental films have been focussed on the spectres of resistance in Portugal’s geo-political past, questioning mechanisms of history production and proposing spaces for performing subjective knowledge. Since 2011, César has been researching the origins of cinema in Guinea- Bissau, its imaginaries and potencies, developing that research into the collective project Luta ca caba inda (the struggle is not over yet).
She was a participant of the research projects Living Archive (2011-13) and Visionary Archive (2013-15) both organised by the Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin. Selected Film Festivals include: Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2013; Curtas Vila do Conde, 2012-2015; Forum Expanded - Berlinale, 2013 and 2016; IFFR, Rotterdam, 2010, 2013 and 2015; Indie Lisboa, 2010; DocLisboa, 2011. Selected exhibitions and screenings include: 8th Istanbul Biennial, 2003; Serralves Museum, Porto, 2005; Tate Modern, London, 2007; SFMOMA, 2009; 29th São Paulo Biennial, 2010; Manifesta 8, Cartagena, 2010, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2011-2015; Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2012; Kunstwerke, Berlin, 2013; Festival Meeting Points 7, 2013-14; NBK, Berlin, 2014; Hordaland 2014-15, Futura, Prague 2015; Khiasma, Paris 2011, 2013 and 2015; Tensta konsthall, 2015.
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TRANSMISSION FROM THE LIBERATED ZONES / 2015
HD, colour, sound, 30'
Transmission from the Liberated Zones is an experiment which brings together Swedish statements and documents accessed and presented by a boy through a low-fidelity feedback channel – an optical dimension created to move through time and between tepid and tropic encounters. This laboratory departs from the concept of “Liberated Zones”, a designation used to describe areas freed from colonial domination, organized and managed by the guerrilla militants of the PAIGC in Guinea during the 11-year liberation war between 1963-74. The Swedish protagonists are the diplomat Folke Löfgren, filmmaker Lennart Malmer, filmmaker and psychologist Ingela Romare and politician Birgitta Dahl, all of whom shared experiences in the Liberated Zones that they visited in the early 1970s. The boy states that recalling instances of liberation prepares the ground for further recurrences.
MINED SOIL / 2012-2014
16 mm film transferred to HD, colour, sound, 32'
The film-essay mined soil revisits the work of the Guinean agronomist Amílcar Cabral, studying in the 50's the erosion of soil in the Portuguese Alentejo region through to his engagement as one of the leaders of the African Liberation Movement. This line of thoughts intertwines a documentation on an experimental gold mining site, operated today by a Canadian company and located in the same Portuguese area once studied by Cabral. The voice over explores the space, surfaces and textures of the images, proposing past and present definitions of soil as a repository of memory, trace, exploitation, crisis, arsenal, treasure and palimpsest.
CONAKRY / 2013
16 mm film transferred to HD, colour, sound, 10’ 26’’
Staged at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Conakry (2012) is a sequence shot on 16 mm film that travels through time, space and media to revisit one film reel from the Guinean archive. This particular reel documents an exhibition curated by Amílcar Cabral at the “Palais du Peuple” in 1972 in Conakry, reporting on the state of the war against Portuguese rule. César invited the Portuguese writer Grada Kilomba and the American radio activist Diana McCarty to reflect on these images and their history.
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CUBA / 2012
16 mm film transferred to HD, colour, sound, 10’ 24’’
In Cuba (2012) a sole tracking shot unfolds during an approximately 10 minutes lecture presented by the Guinean filmmaker and régulo, Suleimane Biai, the Portuguese-Spanish performer Joana Barrios and the Guinean actor and director of Bissau’s Film Institute (INCA), Carlos Vaz. The film proposes a path from Amílcar Cabral’s experience as an agronomist researching the soil around the Portuguese village, Cuba, through his engagement as the leader of the Guinean liberation movement and encourager of the birth of Guinean militant filmmaking, influenced and supported by the Cuban Revolution.
THE EMBASSY / 2011
HD, colour, sound, 27'
The Embassy deals with the codes of representation used by the former Portuguese colonial power over the West African country Guinea-Bissau and with modes of memory production. It shows a photo album depicting the perspective of the Portuguese colonist, who photographed with documentary diligence landscapes, people, architecture and monuments in Guinea-Bissau in the 1940s and 1950s. At the same time, this photo display – grabbed, flipped through and re-framed by the hands of the Guinean archivist Armando Lona – is the departure point for a multi-layered narration on the history of these two countries.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Filipa César
Is an artist and filmmaker interested in the porous boundaries between the moving image and its reception, the fictional dimensions of the documentary and the economies, politics and poetics inherent to cinema praxis. Great part of Cesar's experimental films have been focussed on the spectres of resistance in Portugal’s geo-political past, questioning mechanisms of history production and proposing spaces for performing subjective knowledge. Since 2011, César has been researching the origins of cinema in Guinea- Bissau, its imaginaries and potencies, developing that research into the collective project Luta ca caba inda (the struggle is not over yet).
She was a participant of the research projects Living Archive (2011-13) and Visionary Archive (2013-15) both organised by the Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin. Selected Film Festivals include: Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2013; Curtas Vila do Conde, 2012-2015; Forum Expanded - Berlinale, 2013 and 2016; IFFR, Rotterdam, 2010, 2013 and 2015; Indie Lisboa, 2010; DocLisboa, 2011. Selected exhibitions and screenings include: 8th Istanbul Biennial, 2003; Serralves Museum, Porto, 2005; Tate Modern, London, 2007; SFMOMA, 2009; 29th São Paulo Biennial, 2010; Manifesta 8, Cartagena, 2010, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2011-2015; Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2012; Kunstwerke, Berlin, 2013; Festival Meeting Points 7, 2013-14; NBK, Berlin, 2014; Hordaland 2014-15, Futura, Prague 2015; Khiasma, Paris 2011, 2013 and 2015; Tensta konsthall, 2015.
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