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Events: THE MISSING CHAPTER TMC COLLECTIVE SHOWCASE

Exhibition is at Rivington Place, London until the 30th of January

(Too Many Blackamoors (#8), 2015, Heather Agyepong)

Autograph ABP presents the TMC Collective Showcase featuring new multi-media productions by young creative practitioners responding to 19th century photography associated with Autograph ABP’s ongoing archive research project,The Missing Chapter.

Over a period of six months the group have met with artist-mentors and guests peakers from a number of disciplines to review, question and interpret issues around cultural memory, representation and the archive, in order to produce new works and curate a programme of events in January 2016. Using the image portfolio from The Missing Chapter as their point of departure, the TMC Collective’s engagement bridges their contemporary moment with historic research to invoke a wider conversation with their peers and encourage more activity and participation from a younger generation around archives and heritage.

Featuring work by: Heather Agyepong, Yasmine Akim, Lara Akinnawo, Kariima Ali, Abira Hussein, Shanice Martin, Olivia Mathurin Essandoh, Patricia Nganga. Link to event on Autograph site: http://autograph-abp.co.uk/exhibitions/tmc-collective-showcase Link to facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1697501310486914/

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amaalsaid vscofilm

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Annina | © Amaal Said

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WATCH Imprint 04 | Amaal Said’s Mark: Poetry, Photography, & Filmmaking

Imprint is a conversational series exploring the many marks young Africans are leaving on their world. This installment focuses on Amaal Said and her marks, poetry, photography, and filmmaking.

Learn more about Imprint at ezibota.com/imprint

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Jojo Abot | © Amaal Said

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Jojo Abot | © Amaal Said 

Styled by Jojo Abot Clothes by One of a Kind

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Annina | © Amaal Said

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Horse Money: Surviving in the Breaking Body

By Amaal Said

The director Pedro Costa, in his film ‘Horse Money’, takes the people of Fontainhas, who are on the margins of society, into the centre of his shot. We are watching Ventura play himself.  Ventura grew up in Fontainhas, which was a Lisbon slum that was demolished. He is an old man in a hospital and it is as if we are watching him decay. Costa succeeds in bridging the past and present as the narrative shifts back and forth between the hospital Ventura is admitted to, and his former place of work. People and voices from Ventura’s past come back to him, perhaps as a reminder of how much he has forgotten in order to survive.

Costa chooses to start the film with photographs taken by Jacob Riis, a Danish-American social documentarian who took photographs of ‘how the other half lives’. Riis was committed to documenting the poor living conditions of marginalised people. Costa brings Ventura to the screen not only to comment on the Carnation Revolution of 1974, social disparity and the black immigrant experience, but also at the tenderness between Ventura and the people he encounters and the way he has carried them with him all along.

Isn’t that what happens when you leave? You lose your home and do whatever you can to remember the people and the place you’ve left behind. There is the loss of country, of sanity, of Ventura’s wife and kids. And isn’t it dreary? How all of it came down to loss? In fact it was a series of losses. All of this because the country is gone, the neighbourhood is disappearing, the phone lines have disconnected, the building has been emptied, the people you knew and marched alongside are either dead or have moved their entire lives elsewhere, without you.  

                          “They’ll forget our faces and our suffering,                         but our suffering will be the joy of future men."

Read More

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Interview with Filmmaker Adu Lalouschek

By Annina Chirade

“We want to counteract the simplistic image with which West Africa has been portrayed for hundreds of years – since colonization."  

(Bottom Left: Adu Lalouschek behind-the-scenes on Ga Fishermen, 2015)

Adu Lalouschek is a 21-year-old filmmaker from London and recent graduate of the London College of Communication [University of the Arts]. Whilst studying Film and Television at University, Adu met fellow course mate Alex Wondergem, “I first remember meeting Alex when he was drumming on his lap in a seminar, he saw me and he said ‘Hey brother, where are you from?’”. It was then that they both found they were of mixed-Ghanaian descent, but they began their initial creative partnership as musicians; Alex played the drums whilst Adu was on the guitar. This soon transitioned into a film partnership that would see them co-directing and co-producing, “Our first film was a narrative film based on the Tottenham Riots which we made in 2012. But, my real passion came when we started making our documentaries in West Africa and I could see how our films were part of the changing landscape.”

Alex spent the majority of his life in Accra, whereas Adu grew up in London. they have two distinct visions which they are able to combine to create engaging work. In their second year of study, they came up with the idea for the In the Life series, where they portray interesting personal stories in Ghana. Their first in the series was Scrap Metal Men (2014), in which they followed two scrap workers in Agblogboshie – formerly the world’s largest e-waste dump. The second, Ga Fishermen (2015) documents the fast-disappearing traditions of the Ga fisherman in Accra; it premiered at BAFTA student screening and was shown at Chale Wote 2015. The third, and most recent, is Warrior’s Gym (2015) in which they capture the personal triumph of one of Ghana’s strongest men – Warrior. Both Ga Fishermen and Warrior’s Gym will be available to view at 1:54 from the 15th to 18th of October.

Aside from his films with Alex, Adu has also taken recent trips to Roses, Spain and Nsukka, Nigeria; there he spent time photographing and filming subjects. In this interview he will sharing snapshots from his travels, and films with Alex.

(L: Alex Wondergem R:Adu Lalouschek on the set of Scrap Metal Men, 2014)

Annina: How does your heritage inform the stories and work you choose to do?

Adu: I’m Ghanaian and also Austrian, but first and foremost, I’m a Londoner. Alex and I are both mixed-race, and it’s obvious from our appearance when we walk around Ghana, that we're not fully Ghanaian - we acknowledge that. Our main focus was to not make poverty-chic documentaries. We wanted to make documentaries in Accra, Ghana and not allow people to view Africa as a homogeneous place. We approached it in different ways. In our first documentary Scrap Metal Men, we didn’t have any talking head shots because we thought that was really cliché.  We always made sure we filmed from a lower angle, because we didn’t want to be looking down on our subjects. By incorporating different techniques we found a way to place our feet in the documentary world – it was experimental in that sense. Our voice came through precisely because we didn’t want to dictate to the viewer. We showed some text to give context at the beginning and the end of the documentary, but we really let the viewer inform themselves through the narrative and the characters that we portrayed.

 Annina: How do you build a relationship with your subjects whilst also being aware of maintaining a distance when filming – so that you don’t influence their lives on screen?

Adu: For us, it’s always about getting to know the subjects. I say subjects, but I mean people first. So for our first documentary [Scrap Metal Men], I think that’s when we had our hardest time. We went to Agblogboshie – the biggest e-waste dump in the world – and everyone saw it as a dangerous place. Some people were hostile about being filmed as they had legitimate fears about being exploited on screen. Some people were really receptive, but they weren’t necessarily cinematic. It was really about finding the right characters. We spent a week and a half scouting for people. When we found our two main characters, Chief and Life Owner, we didn’t want to film them straight away, but instead wanted to get to know them as people. We walked around their village and settlement before we filmed it. We wanted to get to know their friends. We took them out to eat before we started filming, as we had to get to know them on a personal level. We didn’t get to know them as well as we did our other subjects for subsequent documentaries. When we were with the fisherman [for their latest documentary Ga Fisherman] we spent at least three weeks with them before we started filming. We went to see them every single day and had interviews with fishermen we didn’t even film. We got to know the wider community and really earned their respect. We came in as outsiders and in the end we became part of the family, because we respected them highly. Alex speaks Ga and they loved him for that! Sometimes the camera was rolling, but we weren't conscious about filming everything. There would be a moments when we’d just turn the camera off, because sometimes you let that moment be. They saw that and respected it.

Click here to read the rest of the piece

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WATCH Imprint 02 | Annina’s Mark: RootedInMagazine

Imprint is a conversational series exploring the many marks young Africans are leaving on their world. This installment focuses on Annina Chirade and her mark, RootedInMagazine.com.

Learn more about Imprint at ezibota.com/imprint

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“I had no idea how to build a website.” -Annina’s Mark: RootedInMagazine.com

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Be Not Amazed

Be not amazed beloved, if sometimes my song grows dark.

If I exchange the lyrical reed for the Khalam or the tama

And the green scent of the rice fields, for the swiftly galloping war

 drums.

I hear the threats of ancient deities, the furious cannonade of the

 god.

Oh, tomorrow perhaps, the purple voice of your bard will be silent

 for ever.

That is why my rhythm becomes so fast, that fingers bleed on

 the Khalam.

Perhaps, beloved, I shall fall tomorrow, on a restless earth

Lamenting your sinking eyes, and the dark tom-tom of the

 mortars below.

And you will weep in the twilight for the glowing face that sang

 your black beauty.

~Léopold Sédar Senghor

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Migrant Tales on Screen

Fundamentally, the medium of film should connect us back to our humanity. When done well it can provide agency to those who are silenced, and remind us of the importance of stories and experiences. The films on this list go some way in showing us this. And hopefully they also act as a counterpoint to the images in the press, that not only desensitize us to suffering, but have little regard for the people and stories they capture.

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working on something with Annina 🌞

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It was so beautiful to be a part of the genesis of this work by the incredibly talented, Amaal Said. It’s not often that we find artists and people who find so many ways to capture and share their gifts with us. Give the film a watch!

| out of shadow |

“what are you making your way out of? maybe skin, maybe shadow.”

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