The June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive is thrilled to present a curated selection of short films by artist-filmmaker and long-time collaborator of JGPACA, Onyeka Igwe on Wednesday 21 February at The Africa Centre.
The ‘Experimenting with Colonial Archives’ programme will include a screening of Igwe’s latest film, A Radical Duet (2023) alongside short films from No Dance, No Palaver (2071-18) a series of 3 works – Her Name in My Mouth (2017); Sitting on a Man (2018) and Specialised Technique (2018) – which cover research into the Aba Women's War of 1929.
No Dance, No Palaver (2018) utilises the first major anti-colonial uprising in Nigeria as an entry point to experiment with colonial moving images relating to West Africa during the first half of the 20th century. The series serves as an attempt to use critical proximity, being close to, with or amongst, the visual trauma of the colonial archive to transform the way in which we know the people it contains.
In 2022, as part of the PerAnkh exhibition at Raven Row, Igwe was invited by JGPACA to engage with the holdings of the archive and produce work in response. The result was A Radical Duet (2023), a short narrative film that imagines what happened when two women of different generations, both part of the post-war independence movements, came together in London to put their fervour and imagination into writing a revolutionary play.
The screening will be followed by Onyeka Igwe in conversation with Dr. June Givanni, founder and director of the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive.
Make sure to stick around after the event at The Africa Centre and join us downstairs in the bar and restaurant area to support TAC’s newly launched residents, Cally Munchy and Abura London.
PROGRAMME
Her Name in My Mouth (2017)
6:02’
The film revisions the Aba Women’s War, the first major anti-colonial uprisings in Nigeria, using embodiment, gesture and the archive. The film is structured around the repurposing of archival films from the British propaganda arm cut against a gestural evocation of the women’s testimonies.
Specialised Technique (2018)
6:16’
William Sellers and the Colonial Film Unit developed a framework for colonial cinema, this included slow edits, no camera tricks and minimal camera movement. Hundreds of films were created in accordance to this rule set. In an effort to recuperate black dance from this colonial project, Specialised Technique, attempts to transform this material from studied spectacle to livingness.
A Radical Duet (2018)
Run time – 27’
In 1947 London was a hub of radical anti-colonial activity, with international intellectuals, artists, and activists such as Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and Sylvia Wynter, C L R James, Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore all in London at this time. Each of them was individually agitating for their respective countries’ national independence, but did they meet, and if so, what did they discuss?
A Radical Duet is a short narrative film that imagines what happened when two women of different generations, both part of the post-war independence movements, came together in London to put their fervour and imagination into writing a revolutionary play.
Onyeka Igwe is a London born and based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality and co-existence in our deeply individualised world. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. She is interested in the prosaic and everyday aspects of black livingness. For her, the body, archives, and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories. 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.
