Single-channel video installation, 40 min. Guinea-Bissau Creole, Portuguese, German, English, French.
In the beginning was the weave, and the transmission of its workings, a curse of mortality – so ends Quantum Creole with the fabulous words of the Papel weaver, Zé Interpretador.
The punch-card technology, designed for the textile loom, was fundamental for the development of the computer – the binary code is thus closer to the ancient act of weaving than to that of writing. Quantum Creole is an experimental documentary film collectively researching creolization and addressing its historical, ontological, and cultural forces. Referring to the minimum physical entity in any interaction – quantum – the film utilizes different imaging forms to read the subversive potential of weaving as Creole code. West African Creole people wove coded messages of social and political resistance into textiles, countering the colonists’ languages and technologies. As the new face of colonization manifests itself as a digital image, upgrading terra nullius in the form of an ultra-liberal free trade zone in the Bissagos Islands, it also marks the continuation of the violence that erupted several centuries ago with the creation of slave-trading posts in the place then known as the Rivers of Guinea and Cape Verde.
Filipa César, born in 1975 in Porto, Portugal, is an artist and filmmaker interested in the fictional aspects of the documentary and the politics and poetics inherent to moving image. Since 2011, César has been looking into the imaginaries of Guinea-Bissau’s Liberation Movement and its cognitive potencies, developing that research into the ongoing collective project Luta ca caba inda (the struggle is not over yet). Her work is widely shown in solo and group exhibitions, biennials, and festivals. Her short films Cuba and Transmission from the Liberated Zones were featured in Forum Expanded in 2013 and 2016, and in 2017 César premiered her feature-length essay film Spell Reel at the Berlinale Forum. She lives and works in Berlin.
