Spectral Grounds, Black Experimental Film is a gathering of moving images by Black women and nonbinary filmmakers across generations, from the dispersed territories of the Black diaspora—continental and otherwise. 

As a programme, Spectral Grounds features works that trade illusory and often violent certainties for unwieldy terrains and troubled waters. They practice experimentation at the level of film, but also, necessarily, at the level of existence, as part of an endless repertoire and arsenal of Black survival. Inhabiting spectral grounds means making grounding a verb rather than a name. Here, grounding is a quest for provisional anchors and reprieves, rather than for permanence or mastery.

The screening programme is divided in four sections: “Wayward Labours”, “Black Speculatives”, “Errantries” and “Nervous Conditions.” Each theme responds to how Labour, History, Territory and the Mind—four core rubrics of Western metaphysics—legitimate existence in an antiblack world. They articulate modes of existence untethered from the ability to labour in recognizable ways, have legible records and histories, hold territory and conform to standards of rational thinking. To be perpetually deprived of the solidity of these grounds, but in excess of spiritual resources from which to unsettle and contest such order of things, is the space we name “spectral grounds”. This is a space of injury but also a space from which to conjure liberatory practices by looking at the camera not for recognition, but to confront and impose one’s looking onto and against it. 

Culture Art Society (CAS) and Monangambee curate exhibitions, workshops, and film screenings focused on artists of African descent in Nigeria, Denmark and the UK. Both our platforms embrace a vision of Black arts as necessarily deconfined from cultural institutions, museums, galleries and even enclosed cinemas. This one-week online programme available in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish, thus responds to this imperative, as well as the context of the Covid-19 pandemic which saw an intensified flourishing of cinematic online programmes. With a return to physical activities for both our platforms, we also want to reaffirm a commitment to the larger publics the virtual opens to.