a so-called archive
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Synopsis
Mixing the genres of the radio play, the corporate video tour, and detective noir with a haunting and critical approach to the horror of discovery, a so-called archive interrogates the decomposing repositories of Empire with a forensic lens. Blending footage shot over a year in two separate colonial archive buildings—one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, United Kingdom—this double portrait considers the “sonic shadows” that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of their memory and their materials.
a so-called archive screens as part of the shorts program Colonial (Dis)entanglements, on Sunday, June 27 at 1:45 pm.
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About the Director
Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation, born and based in London, UK. Through her work, Onyeka is animated by the question “How do we live together?”, with particular interest in the ways the sensorial, spatial and non-canonical ways of knowing can provide answers to this question. She uses embodiment, archives, narration and text to create structural “figure-of-eights”, a form that exposes a multiplicity of narratives. The work comprises untying strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound. Onyeka is part of B.O.S.S., a sound system collective that brings together a community of queer, trans and non-binary people of color involved in art, sound and radical activism. Her works have been shown in the UK and internationally at film festivals and galleries. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019 and the 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship Award for Experimental Film.
