A special screening + communing of Black art films featuring:
Who We Be (2017) by Adama Delphine Fawundu
Go-Rilla Means War (2017) by Crystal Z Campbell
Royaltee (2018) + Looking Glass v. Self (2017) Kamari Bright
How To Return To The Earth When It Turned It's Back On You (2019) by Mia Imani
The works of our guest artists invite us to question what we know, and further what we remember, as thriving survivors offering a/new home to one another. Artist Panel to follow screening.
Presented by Black Cinema Collective and Wa Na Wari
Organized by Berette S Macaulay
About the Program
The imaginative survivance
of settler colonial causation,
of generational displacement,
of occupation,
of reclamation,
seems a perennial r(e)volutionary act of co-creation throughout the Black diaspora.
Through culture-making, dream-scaping, linguistic coding, and embodied rituals of kinship that defy erasure across time, space, and circumstance, there are life-affirming rootings that remove the question of be/longing, and instead – perform it.
While we course-correct histories, how do we sustain our ancestral memories with witnessing and wonderment to cultivate new futures?
When considering the role of caretakers and storytellers, how do we nourish indigenous and diasporic kinfolk, and the earth?
How do we re-figure our co-existent “right to rights”, and our right to belong?
The works of our guest artists invite us to question what we know, and further what we remember, as thriving survivors offering a/new home to one another.
About the Artists & Films
Who We Be, 2017
“Who We Be is an experimental video with words, sounds and visuals. It is a collaboration between me and James Benjamin Lewis aka Biggie Flighter (featured performer) as we think about the social and political implications of colonialism and slavery on language. James Benjamin Lewis is a musician and activist based in Freetown, Sierra Leone, W. Africa.”
ADAMA DELPHINE FAWUNDU is a photo-based visual artist born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. She received her MFA from Columbia University. Ms. Fawundu is a co-author/editor of the critically acclaimed book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. This book features over 100 women photographers of African descent from around the globe. Her most recent works investigate indigenous ontologies while imagining new ways of being in the world. Her interests included decolonization, memory, and interrogating histories. Fawundu uses photography, video, sculpture and printmaking to create new transnational identities as she explores Afrofuturist ideas.
http://delphinefawudu.com
Go-Rilla Means War, 2017
With 35mm film salvaged from a now demolished black civil rights theater in Brooklyn, Go-Rilla Means War is a filmic relic of gentrification–––a parable weaving intersections of development,
cultural preservation, and erasure.
Originally commissioned by SculptureCenter, as part of curator Alexis Wilksinon's In Practice Exhibition
CRYSTAL Z CAMPBELL is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of African American, Filipino, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets— fragments of information known by many but untold or unspoken. Recent works revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks's “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Sonic, material, and archival traces of the witness informs their work in film, performance, installation, sound, painting, and texts.
Honors and awards include the Pollock-Krasner Award, MAP Fund, MacDowell, MAAA, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, Franklin Furnace; Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and Flaherty Film Seminar. Exhibitions include the Drawing Center (US), Nest (NL), ICA-Philadelphia (US), REDCAT (US), Artissima (IT), Studio Museum of Harlem (US), Project Row Houses (US), and SculptureCenter (US), amongst others. Campbell’s writing has been featured in World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Campbell is founder of the virtual programming platform archiveacts.com.
Campbell is a Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellow (2020-2021) living and working in Oklahoma.
www. crystalzcampbell.com
Royaltee, 2018
A poetic short film highlighting the hidden nobility of even the persecuted parts of Black culture.
Looking Glass v. Self, 2017
Inspired by the increased publicity of police brutality and Black death through social media channels, Looking Glass v. Self highlights the influence of negative media imagery on perception, identity formation, and mental health.
KAMARI BRIGHT is an award-winning emerging creative whose videopoems have screened at the 8th International Video Poetry Festival of Thuringia, Tacoma Film Festival, Cadence Video Poetry Festival, Festival International du Film PanAfricain de Cannes, Seattle Black Film Festival, and the 2020 Film & Videopoetry Symposium. She is currently working on a videopoem connecting personal trauma and land stewardship/pollution.
kamaribright.com
How To Return To The Earth When It Turned It's Back On You, 2019
“They forced their minds to desert their bodies and their striving spirits sought to rise like frail whirlwinds from the hard red clay.” - Alice Walker
How To Return To The Earth When It Turned It's Back On You is not a recreation of a dream but an invitation to extend its messages. Filmed in a forest close to where I use to incubate my dreams (Königsheide, Berlin), How To Return is a documentation of an experimental ritual that explores the following questions:
How can we connect with our ancestors through the soil?
How can we heal the wounds that are left in the soil?
How can we retrieve stored memories in soil?
Special Thanks to Shannon Sea, Sound Artist
In collaboration with, and filmed by interdisciplinary artist János Brückner.
MIA IMANI is an international interdisciplinary artivist (art + activist) and arts writer based in Berlin, Germany. She creates and curates liminal spaces that invite Black and Brown communities to heal individual and communal trauma through conscious (day-dreaming, visualization) and subconscious (lucid, REM sleep) dreaming. These works aim to center the agency of marginalized communities and use dreams as a portal to manifest alternative past(s), present(s), and future(s). Mia’s creative and collaborative work has lived in the Northwest Film Forum, Seattle Art Museum Lab, Savvy Contemporary, and is expanding into the digital and other interdisciplinary spaces. Her written work lives both digitally and in print within publications Cultured Magazine, Contemporary And, Daddy Magazine, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Vice, and more.
She received her B.A. in Media Communications Studies from the University of Washington and is completing her Master’s in North American Culture and Literature studies at Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany.
About the Organizer
BERETTE S MACAULAY is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and writer born in Sierra Leone, W. Africa, raised in Jamaica and the UK, and now living in the US. She is a transcultural roving spirit deeply drawn to migration + displacement histories of colonial peoples. She is the founder of Black Cinema Collective and co-organizes programs with Mateó B. Ochoa and Savita Krishnamoorthy. She also serves as the Art Liaison Program Manager at Henry Art Gallery and was recently named the inaugural Curatorial Fellow at On the Boards.