Resonance Spiral

Guinea-bissauic Creole“Nothing falls from the sky apart from rain,” says Amílcar Cabral in a tape recording from 1970. The women of the Satna Fai agricultural workers’ collective listen to this historical document stemming from the politician, poet, and theoretician; they rest as Cabral demands equality between the sexes, which he sees as essential for shared progress. The setting is the Abotcha building in Malafo, a traditional Balanta village in Guinea-Bissau, which has housed the Mediateca Onshore since 2023. Old plans for a videotheque are revisited and materialize a mediateca. An informal sewing workshop, an experimental garden, a library, and a preschool take-up space. Adolescents voice a circle and sound self-built instruments. Together with filmmaker Sana na N’Hada and others, since 2011 filmmaker Filipa César has been working on reconstructing the audiovisual memory of the country’s liberation movement and making it accessible to the public; artist Marinho de Pina has been involved since 2017. In RESONANCE SPIRAL, César and de Pina document the construction of the Abotcha and the agro-poetic practices that take place there, showing dialogues between archive, performing arts, and community.

Filipa César is an artist, filmmaker, educator, and community organizer. She studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and at the Faculdade de Belas Artes of the University of Lisbon. In 2008, she completed an MA in Art in Context at the University of the Arts Berlin. Since 2011, she has been researching the origins of the cinema of the African Liberation Movement in Guinea-Bissau as a laboratory for decolonizing epistemologies. She premiered her first feature-length films SPELL REEL at the Berlinale Forum in 2017 and RESONANCE SPIRAL in 2024, while Quantum Creole was exhibited at Forum Expanded in 2020. She lives and works in Berlin.

Marinho de Pina is a filmmaker, transdisciplinary artist, performer, poet, musician, and writer. He is currently a research assistant at the Centre for Studies on Socioeconomic Change and Territory in Lisbon doing his PhD on Sacred Spaces in Bissau. Since 2017, he has been working on Mediateca Abotcha in Guinea-Bissau with Filipa Cesár, Sana na N’Hada, and Suleimane Biai, a program for the cultural creation of dreams and utopias with the local community.