With support from Carleton University’s Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis and Film Studies Program, and The Goethe Institute in Montreal, Knot Project Space presented a special talk by artist and filmmaker Filipa César. This live event also functioned as the reception for César’s short-term single-channel exhibition Conakry, which was on display at Knot Project Space from November 19th – December 1st, 2019. The talk and its related exhibition were presented as part of a series of Fall/Winter 2019 programs and seminars at Knot Project Space that looked at relationships between voice, fiction, collectivity and publication.
Meteorisations: Reading Amilcar Cabral’s Agro-Poetics of Liberation
A reading of Amílcar Cabral’s agronomic writings exposes substrata of a syntax for liberation later performed in guerrilla language and the struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. This visual and sonic reading explores the definitions of soil and erosion that Cabral developed as an agronomist, as well as his reports on colonial land exploitation and analysis of the trade economy, to unearth his double agency as a state soil scientist and as a ‘seeder’ of African liberation.
Filipa César
Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in the porous boundaries between the moving image and its reception, the fictional dimensions of the documentary and the economies, politics and poetics inherent to cinema praxis. Characterised by rigorous structural and lyrical elements, her multiform meditations often focus on Portuguese colonialism and the liberation of Guinea-Bissau in the 1960s and 1970s. This research developed into the collective project Luta ca caba inda (The Struggle Is Not Yet Over). She gained a MA Art in Context at the University of Arts, Berlin. Selected exhibitions and screenings include at the São Paulo Biennial, Manifesta 8, Cartagena, and the Contour 8 Biennial in Mechelen, Belgium, and Gasworks, London. Festival screenings include the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Curtas Vila do Conde, Forum Expanded at the Berlinale and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Related Programming
Exhibition: Conakry, Filipa César. Nov. 19 – Dec. 1, 2019. Knot Project Space.
Workshop: Working with the Archive, Filipa César, Laura Horak + Aboubakar Sanogo.
Screening: Spell Reel, Filipa César. Nov. 27, 2019. Knot Project Space.