Screening virtually from December 18-25, 2022, Archival Mappings, Three by Onyeka Igwe, accompanied by a conversation between artist-filmmaker Onyeka Igwe and architectural designer/researcher Thandi Loewenson.
Onyeka Igwe manipulates found footage, sounds & other archival material – questioning the colonial gaze and reasserting the agency of the colonized. She uncovers the material & metaphoric remnants of the British colonial regime in all its ugliness, but also beautifully recollects personal and collective memories from multiple visual and narrative fronts.
Program:
Specialised Technique (2018)
The names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019)
A so-called archive (2020)
Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher born and based in London, UK, working between cinema, non-fiction video work and installation. She uses dance, voice, archive and text to create structural ‘figure-of-eights’, a format that exposes a multiplicity of narratives. The work comprises of untieable 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. She is particularly focused on invoking lineages of female ancestors and recovering erased African women’s histories from the colonial archives.
Onyeka’s works have been screened at Camden Arts Centre, Dak’art OFF (Senegal) and Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh) and at film festivals internationally including European Media Arts Festival (Germany), London Film Festival, Media City Film Festival (Canada), International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Smithsonian African American film festival (USA). Solo exhibitions include The High Line, (New York), LUX (London) and Jerwood Arts (London).
Specialized technique (Onyeka Igwe, 2018, 6 minutes)
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.
The names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (Onyeka Igwe, 2019, 25 minutes)
This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria—retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. So the names have changed tell us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; a story of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown.Igwe pushes against the materials of the archive—its distortions, fabrications and embellishments—with her own kind of autofictional response. The artist summons a variety of artistic, literary and personal sources to create a singular biographical document of many strands. the names have changed throws the ordinary and the everyday within the archive into relief by daring to write and re-write the stories of diasporic African life against the grain of colonial history’s master narratives. (Tendai John Mutambu)
A so-called archive (Onyeka Igwe, 2020, 19 minutes)
The work interrogates the decomposing repositories of Empire with a forensic lens. Blending footage shot over the past year in two separate colonial archive buildings—one in Lagos, Nigeria, and the other in Bristol, United Kingdom—this double portrait considers the ‘sonic shadows’ that colonial images continue to generate, despite the disintegration of their memory and their materials. Igwe’s film imagines what might have been ‘lost’ from these archives, mixing genres of the radio play, the corporate video tour, and detective noir with a haunting and critical approach to the horror of discovery.In Lagos, the former Nigerian Film Unit was one of the first self-directed outposts of the British visual propaganda engine, the Colonial Film Unit (1932-1955). A So-Called Archive documents a building largely emptied of its contents, finding desolate rooms full of dust, cobwebs, stopped clocks, and rusty and rotting celluloid film cans. The materials found in this building are hard to see, not only because of their condition, but also perhaps because people do not want to see them.Meanwhile, in Bristol Temple Meads, the former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (2002-2009) was previously housed in the vaults of one Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s most famous railway designs. The museum included photography, film, sound and object collections from across the former British Empire. Like the Nigerian Film Unit building, this building too has been emptied of its content; the museum closed shortly after reported allegations of the illegal sale of several items from its collection. A So-Called Archive depicts these former archives—along with their histories of hoarding, monetisation, documentation and now abandonment—as metonyms for the enduring entanglements between the UK and its former colonies. They were and continue to be home purulent images that we cannot, will not, or choose not to see. (Mason Leaver-Yap)
Onyeka Igwe in conversation with Thandi Loewenson
Thandi: I was thinking about the idea of revisiting work since you recently screened your work in Lagos for the first time. I’m wondering how reviewing your work has elicited new understandings for you?
Onyeka: I recognize different versions of myself in the films which sometimes is kind of uncomfortable. It’s a reminder of what I was like or thinking about a few years ago, almost like a document you can refer back to. Because these films were part of the research I was doing for a PhD, there is a chronological plotting of questions I was trying to get at, and each film is a different way to approach these questions. I also think that I don’t really understand my work until quite a few years after. In Lagos, I had such a strong experience watching these films with mostly people that live there. I felt shy, very vulnerable and exposed presenting these versions of myself that were learning or unlearning. It’s just very different watching these films with an audience which I assume has more of a connection and vested interest in the questions I’m asking in terms of Nigerian history, colonial history and West African culture, as opposed to other contexts where I am the one who is introducing the audience to these questions.
a so-called archive (2020), because it was done more recently and also during the lockdowns and the pandemic, it feels very strange, haunting. Someone said it reminds them of a horror film or ghost film. I was like,” really?” I was surprised.
Still from a-so called archive (2020)
Thandi: I had goosebumps watching it!
Onyeka: I can see it now, but making it, I wasn’t trying to work with the trope of horror. Clearly there was something haunting me while making it, a certain presence in the archives,, but it wasn’t conscious at all.
Thandi: This resonates so much because I was thinking a lot about haunting when watching the work. In Specialised Technique (2018) there is a scene where you are projecting onto your body, which I read as a kind of possession. Also the way the light works is quite spectral at times. It made me think of Hartman’s work on critical fabulation, attending to and feeling for the contours of the gaps rather than trying to fill them. There is something very powerful when you place yourself or others — their bodies or their voices — in the work. I constantly come back to Mark Fischer’s distinction between the eerie, defined by absence, and the weird as this more productive mode, defined by the presence of something that shouldn’t be but is. I see that so much in your work, in these layers, archival materials, places, sounds… How do you think about placing yourself in the films in relation to the work of disrupting or refiguring the archives?
Onyeka: Making Specialised Technique (2018), I found out about this grammar of colonial filmmaking that William Sellers had developed when he was in charge of the Colonial Film Unit. He believed the physiology and intelligence of Africans meant they weren’t capable of being cinema literate. The technique, then, was meant to be the standard of cinema literacy. It was about being very literal: no camera movement, no montage, no trickery, no close ups. In sum, really boring films. I wanted to work with this material and get it to do different things, to be weird, to have another kind of presence which ran against the logic which presided over its creation. I wanted to use the material against itself. This grammar, although debunked in the 1950s via a report that the colonial film unit did on itself, continues in filmmaking. After all, the first Nigerian filmmakers were trained by the colonial film unit, by the overseas television film center… I kind of recognize that grammar in the Nollywood films I used to watch in the 1990s.
I just happened to be wearing this black leather skirt, and I really wanted to see if I could dance with the people in the archives. It was like an impulse, a need or desire for proximity, to disrupt the colonial gaze, the ways in which the material asked to be viewed, from a studied distance.
But I also, in a way, wanted to make sure the audience knew that the filmmaking is subjective. I am doing this work, whoever and however I am presented as in the film, because of course, it’s not a constant or stable I. There are a bunch of films about critiquing the colonial archive by white filmmakers that never call themselves into account. I really wanted to separate the work from that body of practice. Going to an archive and smelling the paper, touching people’s pen scratches, being tactile with this material. It’s going through me. There is a contact happening, that I wanted to be recorded.
Still from Specialised Technique (2018)
Thandi: This is so incendiary, I just imagine you dancing in these archival spaces. Truly you are misbehaving, Onyeka. One isn’t supposed to do these things! In this trope of groundbreaking anticolonial films that go into the archives and show the horrors of it, often done by white filmmakers, all the labor, intimacy and tenderness of the people that worked in these spaces, that maintained them, that misbehaved within them is lost.
There is this slippage between the films, reading across them, they develop a kind of argument. And then within the films themselves, you have all different kinds of media rubbing alongside one another. I’m wondering how the polyvocality of it all disrupts supposedly dominant notions of order or understandings of history and knowledge? Zimbabwean writer, Mhoze Chikowero writes about the role of spirits in the liberation and how one of the biggest fears of the colonizer was that the response to the repression would not just be in the physical realm but comprise all of these other planes, that is “a return of the repressed in possession mode”. In your work you develop a method of making / thinking / speaking as a disruptive mode, an anticolonial method. Do you think about your methodology as explicit or intuitive, something that comes up of what you are presented in a way?
Onyeka: What you’re saying makes me think of this line in Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts, which I believe she borrows from NourbeSe Philips, the idea of trying her tongue… That image stayed with me. In some ways, the films are an attempt to do that. In the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019), there is this gestural movement between me and another dancer, which is ultimately trying to tell a story in this liminal, spectral space. I was also thinking of Emezi’s Freshwater, the passages describing that other space they are in, when talking with these spirits. I don’t have the framework, language, or instruction to put it in these terms. Nonetheless, I was led by encounters in the archive and I am purposely open to whatever comes from these experiences: any kind of thought, memory, gesture… Encounter was the leading methodology.
Thandi: One of the incredible gifts of your practice is how you propose an ethics of working with this material which resonates across so many other contexts. My family lives in Zimbabwe, and I’ve been working a lot in Zambia, but with the pandemic and not being able to travel has brought up a lot of anxieties. I’m realizing that a lot of the work is trying to feel for a place, to present a reading of it, but also trying to understand one’s relation with it. There is this beautiful moment in the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019) where you’re talking with your dad with such incredible vulnerability, tenderness, but also humor…
Onyeka: I was cringing so much in Lagos watching this, precisely because it is so earnest. the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019), especially, is very much reaching for a landing. I try to understand my relationship to a home I’ve felt an absence from for a long time. I was very anxious about showing the work in Nigeria. I showed the work a few years ago in Sweden and someone in the audience who is Nigerian from the diaspora said, “this is such a diaspora film”. So I was really wondering what people who live in Nigeria would think. The films are a kind of offering to bridge a gap. They really put a relationship of absence at the front.
Thandi: So how was it to show the films in Lagos?
Onyeka: I was really bracing myself for criticism, but people had lots of different things to say, and were approaching the work from places I hadn’t encountered so much. There wasn’t the “oh this is interesting because it is different”, which is often a response you get from audiences not familiar with the context. The questions were getting to the heart of things a bit quicker. I felt very unconfident in talking about the films which felt refreshing. They have screened in the same contexts quite a lot. I developed a sense of how to talk about them… But this time, being in Lagos, I was thinking a little bit more about it and I also saw them in a different way.
Still from the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019)
Thandi: Thank you for saying that and I recognize a lot of it. Especially what you’re saying about the diaspora filmmaking. It is a real anxiety, a horror even. I made a short film last year, Ukochekoche hweChizevezeve Intelsat 502 / Whisper Network Intelsat 502 (2022) about a particular site in Zimbabwe, and had an opportunity to screen it in Johannesburg recently. I worked with a translator to translate the voiceover into shona, one of the main languages in Zimbabwe. It was really an incredible experience, because of all the slippages it introduces between voice and image. But then showing the work in different contexts always comes up with a lot of anxiety.
I guess my last question is about fiction, a term I find productive in some ways but also quite restrictive, increasingly, because of how people place the work in particular ways when this word comes up. I’m curious about other kinds of storytelling modes which inform your work?
Onyeka: In the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019) there are a few narrative devices going on. For me it is really about telling the same story in multiple ways. I am really not interested in truth, with capital T or in the plural either, but rather I’m reaching for a kind of collapse. The archives is a collection of stories arranged in a particular way and presented because of hierarchies of power. The aim of the films then is to put as many of the stories that don’t exist in the official archives next to each other. My mum’s telling I won’t call it a fiction but a telling, a story or a memory passed down to her.
This also came up in the conversation in Lagos: there was a lot of distrust of the term “oral history” as this Western term which separates, categorizes and raises some elements as worthy of study. Instead of broadening or trying to allow things to climb up the ladder, what about flattening or horizontalizing all of these different approaches without trying to subsume the contradictions, frictions and how these different orders of knowledge rub against each other? I’m interested in gatherings, in multiplicity as disorder, disruption. And then, there is this relinquishing of control which happens as the films continue their lives, never to be complete, as new audiences bring new readings. This is a privilege of the life of a film, really. In my quest to transform colonial images, I initially thought about it as something that happens in the making of the film, but I am realizing this is more of an ongoing process that other people come into by watching.
Thandi: Yes, but also through the continuation of your work too, they echo backwards somehow and provide new readings of your past practice. I feel like part of the mechanism of colonial epistemologies is prescribing a finitude or completion and your work kind of undoes that. Particularly in the endings, they resist comfort. There is a beautiful moment in Specialised Technique (2018), as a face almost burns through the surface of the film on which you are drawing. It was such an electric moment for me. You burst the archive open and all of these voices, ideas, energies, spirits, come out of this stream and run amok in such powerful ways.
Onyeka: Thank you so much, I really like running amok and misbehaving as ways to think about my methodology!