AFTERIMAGES

AfterImages is a series of film installations and screenings that interrogate the coloniality of archival moving images. Drawing upon the histories of specifically Cameroonian and more broadly Global South cinemas, these works show how archival and experimental filmic registers can complicate our understanding of the residual and the spectral in the midst and aftermath of colonial violence. The cinematic afterimage becomes both method and metaphor: a trace that refuses disappearance, a remnant that unsettles the authority of linear time and official (colonial) memory.

In Listening to Images, Tina Campt writes of an “archival interrogation of the multiple temporalities of visual archives,” and AfterImages mirrors this imperative, considering the afterimage not simply as visual residue of the archive, but as a form of durational witnessing, a persistence that holds in relation what has been erased and what continues to recur. These works do not seek to reconstitute a whole or fill in historical absences. Instead, they inhabit the gaps, mobilizing the fragment, the silence, the repetition, and the affective charge of archival footage to propose new modes of presencing and new interpretations of cinematic time. The afterimage, here, is both index and echo.

AfterImages asks how histories are made visible, audible, and thinkable through film, drawing from archival fragments, cultural residues such as music, gesture, and choreography, and the spectral recursions of radical cinematic turns once thought lost. These works challenge the fixity of the archive, offering instead a space where the material and the memorial coexist in entanglement. They undo the binary between what can be seen and what is remembered, reworking cinema into a spatio-temporal zone of (un)folding, looping and resistance to closure. Here, gaps or absences are not interpreted as lack but rather as openings with the potential for fabulation, speculation, or what Toni Morrison calls “rememory.”

To this effect, AfterImages foregrounds an ethics of attention: to what lingers in the archive, what recurs, and what has been made difficult to see.