Valie Djordjević: Filipa, you were already several times at Forum and Forum Expanded with your work. We as the audience were able to follow the development of the different projects that all seem to build on each other. The documentary SPELL REEL was in Forum 2017. 2020 you had an installation in Forum Expanded called QUANTUM CREOLE. And now we have RESONANCE SPIRAL. It’s not just a documentary film, but a documentation of this bigger project, called Mediateca Onshore. How did this project come about?
Filipa César: The Mediateca project started basically one day after the premiere of SPELL REEL. We premiered SPELL REEL in February 2017 and then in the evening, this group of people joined us after the screening and we arranged a meeting. Marinho was also there – that’s how we met. I didn’t know him before. He was not only Guinean, but also an architect and a poet and a writer. So, everything was magically coming together.
The idea was that the work we were doing – unearthing these film archives, activating them and questioning their politics – was very important. Not just in Europe but also in the African countries these archives were coming from. But we needed spaces for them and for these practices. It was wonderful to create the mobile cinema, discussions and activations, performative processes and the questioning the archives that were documented in SPELL REEL. We were happy to have had allies like the Arsenal in Berlin and other places, but we also needed these spaces in Africa. So, the Mediateca idea was formed in exactly that moment.
VD: How do you remember this first phase, Marinho?
Marinho de Pina: I also had this impression of things coming together. When I went to see the movie SPELL REEL, I didn’t know Filipa. I went there because of Sana [Na N'Hada] who I didn’t know personally either, but I’d heard of him. We started talking about this idea of building a space. And I was an architect, so I was like: hello, it’s me you’re looking for. The first place where we were trying to realize this project was in Bubaque. For some reason or other, it became impossible to do it there…we had many kinds of problems – with the place, with the people, it just didn’t fit. Then we happened to learn that the people from Sana’s village wanted a biblioteca, a library, since 1974, after independence. So, it was easy: they wanted a biblioteca in their village, and we had a mediateca to put together. It was an encounter of desires, of wishes. They wanted it there, so we achieved it.
It was an encounter of desires, of wishes. They wanted it there, so we achieved it.
Stefanie Schulte Strathaus: As magically as the two of you met, we also met with you, Filipa, some years earlier. It was around 2010, when we were in the middle of the Living Archive project. There were obvious parallels between our project and your work: You interweave your research practice, your social and political practice and your artistic practice in such a way that everything becomes one. At that time, you had just met Sana and Flora [Gomes], and they introduced you to this film archive in Guinea-Bissau, which dates back to the time of the decolonization struggles and state-building. You came up with a lot of artistic and curatorial ideas to bring this archive to life. This collaboration was something we at the Arsenal learned a lot from and which has changed the work of our institution in many ways.
In your work you integrate not only your own art but also the work of other people which then becomes something new. In RESONANCE SPIRAL we see for example the letter by Chris Marker that was also part of an installation of yours during the Archival Assembly exhibition some years ago. Curatorial work, artistic work and above all collaborative work – perhaps you could talk a little about your practice.
FC: I went from the art world – more precisely from video art – to cinema very much through the encounters I had in Germany. In the beginning, it was difficult to convince people at that time to save an archive that was decomposing in Guinea-Bissau, and to get funding to save it. I think today there’s a different awareness, but at that time it was very complicated. I was thinking about the potentials of an art practice in actually doing things that are normally not fundable, because one’s art practice can be whatever one wants to create or to do. That actually led me to the Living Archive project where we met. Actually, friends pointed me towards it and said that it deals with archives as an artistic practice and is right up my alley. It was very inspiring for me to see how we can think about this imaginary and involve it in different kinds of artistic collaborations.
There is some kind of spell in that, that you make something possible through imagining it. If you can imagine it, it’s going to be possible.
There is always something fictional going on when trying to fund a project. When I was writing the applications, it was always before things were happening. For example, with SPELL REEL, I was writing: “We’re going to document a mobile cinema through Guinea-Bissau.” I was sitting in Portugal imagining those things. If you want to get funding, you have to tell this story, you have to invent, speculate and imagine. With RESONANCE SPIRAL it was the same, we were imagining that we’re going to build a space, there would be workshops inside, we would invite people and so on. It’s a kind of a speculative practice, because you imagine that something is going to exist for you to document. There is some kind of spell in that, that you make something possible through imagining it. If you can imagine it, it’s going to be possible.
SSS: SPELL REEL and RESONANCE SPIRAL – there are circles and spirals in the titles of both these feature-length films. In RESONANCE SPIRAL, there are also circles everywhere, for example the archive images that are superimposed over the picture are circular, the intertitles are circular, you see women standing in circles, and many other circular formations. So, talk about circles!
FC: For me it has a lot to do with the concept of time that is spiral and not linear, like all film and sound reels. The way time is constructed in my western imaginary is linear – we have past, present, future and time moves in one direction. If something has happened, it’s over. I understood through many of the interactions I had with my friends in Guinea-Bissau that this is not self-evident. There are completely different ontological concepts of life and death. What is life, what is death, what is alive, what are these kinds of separations? As [Amílcar] Cabral used to say, we are a society of dead and living, we are a crowd. He was using the ancestors as a kind of anticolonial force. Even if you kill us, we still remain here – the dead are among us and we struggle together.
Archival work has a similar aspect for me. It is a materialization of these animistic ideas, because you can reactivate and reencounter things that are there otherwise than they were when they were captured. This feminist speech of Cabral that was in the Guinean archive is amazing. Nobody had listened to it for decades. In the end he is talking about tomorrow, and he says, maybe not tomorrow, March 9th, but maybe tomorrow in ten years. He’s already thinking about this circle, this kind of recurrence.
A lot of things have this kind of circularity. In terms of spaces, originally, we wanted to use a circular architecture, but then it was easier to create this open space, where the circle is possible, instead of a circular space. But the circle was actually so latent in the process of reflecting.
MP: I think the circle is a simpler form of geometry. For example, when people gather, we normally do it in a circle because then everyone can see the eyes of the person in front of her. When you are in a corner, you lose the line of sight, but in a circle you can see each other’s faces. So, we normally organize that way to discuss, to enjoy things together. In Mandinga we have even have a word for this, Bantaba. Bantaba signifies a circular space with a tree or another structure where people gather. It is used also in other languages in Guinea-Bissau, even in Creole. A round space is a good space to be in.
This idea of the circle, be it architectural or in other contexts, it is very much connected to the practice we try to develop in the Mediateca Abotcha. The issue of separating spaces and moments and time is a Western concept that is foreign to Guinea-Bissau, the culture I am from. In the West there is a time to dance, a time to work, a time to pray, a time to go to a museum, a time to rest. In Guinea, normally we are not separating things this way. You can pray dancing. If you’re building a bench to sit on, you’re going to make it nice and beautiful. It’s not a design object, but just because you’re going to sit on it, it doesn’t mean you have to make it ugly. Art is not separate from living. The spaces and concepts are all mixed up. But somehow in the modern world, we put things apart: art there, tradition here, music there. In Mediateca, we are trying to blend all these things together again in the best way possible, in the best way we can do it. Like Filipa said before, we can make art out of everything: people plowing in their lands could be art, depending on the way we look at it.
You can pray dancing. If you’re building a bench to sit on, you’re going to make it nice and beautiful. It’s not a design object, but just because you’re going to sit on it, it doesn’t mean you have to make it ugly. Art is not separate from living.
VD: Trying to kind of get rid of the separation between the different spheres is an old utopian hope. It reminds me of something Filipa said in the film, when you were lying around in the mangroves and talking: Everything to make the world a better place is here in Malafo, we just have to communicate it. So, is Malafo a utopian project? A model for the rest of the world?
MP: I think we have to be aware that what we see in the film and the reality, that the camera doesn’t focus on, are two different things. For example, those women that we see listening to the Cabral speech about the importance of women for the community – they have to go to work. Only after work can they gather with us to do this beautiful practice. We cannot separate the reality of life and the weight of capitalism from the artistic practice that we are seeing. People have to eat. And this affects the practice of life and the ways of enjoying life. There is a constant competition that society throws over people. We have to deal with this. We are not trying to change the world. I’m trying to change myself through sharing my inner world with other people and learning from them in the best way possible, through joy and through getting to know each other. We do this kind of practice in Malafo, but we are respecting the cycle of work there. We communicate with the community, is this a good time or would it be better to come at another time.
The idea is to transform ourselves and the people. We’re working together, learning from them, giving them back some of our knowledge. I am lucky to know many cultures, to have traveled the world and to have read a lot. I think that brings me different insights, another perspective that I can share with other people. This kind of learning, this kind of sharing, helps to build this idea of community. We’re not communists, I was saying to Filipa, we are communalist.
FC: We are always learning amazing things there. We can navigate the world on planes, but there are people there that have such a knowledge of nature, and they navigate nature and the landscape and their time in a way that is deeply skilled. And it’s full of hints about the balance of life between humans and nature. One of the things that Marinho and I and the collective have been discussing is that a lot of the young people that are already in touch with mobile phones have this pressure to fulfill these fantasies like “I want to be a football player, I want to go to Europe, or I want to have a mobile phone and Facebook” and so on. But there are also a lot of other people – for example, Pedro is a person that is so fascinated and enchanted by his own local knowledge, and also Bedan and many of our other friends as well…
It’s about attention in the sense of attending to something.
There are always many things happening that are not in the film at all: voice and music workshops, drawing workshops, film screenings, Marinho telling stories. The magic happens when we create a space to give attention, pulling away the pressures and giving space to things to be taken seriously. This is something that we have been experimenting a lot with, and the community has been experimenting with us as well. It’s about attention in the sense of attending to something. In Africa, many foreigners that arrive to these communities, they have interests that have to do with extracting something and taking something away, or they come with some kind of NGO agenda where they know exactly everything that they have to do. They arrive there with a sense of, we bring you health or we bring you education. In our practice, it’s about this negotiation and about also not knowing so much, and not coming with a lot of certainties either.
SSS: In the movie there is a conversation with Sana in which you ask the question whether a new activity, like building a library, takes time away from something else, like working in agriculture. I found it very interesting to realize that you never just add something. If you add something, you also have to take something away elsewhere – in other words, you have to change something. Maybe you can comment on that.
FC: That was a question from the beginning with all of us. These communities are incredibly fragile because they are self-sustaining. They eat what they can get from the fields and forest. And so, if someone comes and says: “Oh, we want to work with you and give you lots of culture and art – look, how beautiful,” people will be like, “yeah, but you’re taking away my time of going to the fields and fetching water. This is what nourishes and feeds us.” They work incredibly hard and are under an unbelievable pressure to sustain themselves. And that’s why we go there with some money, but we don’t throw it around. Normally, Sana negotiates how exactly we’re going to distribute this compensation for the time. So if we bring, for example, a water pump, we save the village time, meaning people have the free time for something other than work. That changes many things, and it is not unproblematic. If we organize workshops, how do we compensate for the work that they cannot do in that time?
These things are negotiated in the collective, so they themselves make time for these spaces to happen. The beautiful thing in these Balanta communities, as Sana was saying, is that everything is decided collectively. The community comes together, and all these things are debated in the circle.
It’s like being in the womb of the earth. One feels protected and sheltered.
VD: We already talked about your conversation in the mangrove mud where you talk about your own positions as filmmakers and artists coming from the outside. I found it very poetic talking about these complicated muddy subjects covered in the mud between the mangroves. How did this scene happen?
FC: Marinho and I, we discuss a lot. We have a lot of big conversations about ethics and about politics. So, during filming, we decided that we have to stage these kinds of discussions somehow, but we didn’t want to talk directly to one another, but through the mangrove.
MP: The idea was, we are all made of mud, of earth – as it is said “ashes to ashes, earth to earth, dust to dust” in the Christian funeral service. It was a means to downgrade your own importance, your own ego, and be in the mud. But in the end, it was very soothing. It’s so calm to be there. It’s so peaceful …
FC: …And the water is so warm. It’s very cozy, actually. I mean, we had all these little animals nibble on us, but they were quite gentle.
MP: It’s like being in the womb of the earth. One feels protected and sheltered.
FC: Exactly. And the mangroves are exactly that, they are the wombs where the fishes put their eggs in these muddy places because it’s safe.
MP: Your mother is there hugging you through the mud. You feel comfortable bringing up heavy issues.
