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 single-channel exhibition, Conakry, by filmmaker Filipa César. The exhibition was presented in relation to a reading/performance by César which also took place at Knot Project Space titled, Meteorisations: Reading Amilcar Cabral’s Agro-Poetics of Liberation, as well as a screening of her feature length film, Spell Reel (2017). The exhibition and its related programming were presented as part of a series of Fall/Winter 2019 public programs and closed seminars at Knot Project Space that looked at relationships between voice, fiction, collectivity and publication. Accompanying the Conakry exhibition was a micro-library featuring selected texts from the Libson-based publishing collective Atlas Projectos, with whom César worked in the production of her book Luta ca caba inda. Time Place Matter Voice. 1967-2017 and other projects.
Conakry
Staged at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Conakry is a sequence shot on 16mm film that travels through time, space and media to revisit one film reel from the Guinean archive. This particular reel documents an exhibition curated by Amílcar Cabral at the Palais du Peuple in 1972 in Conakry, Guinea, reporting on the state of the war against Portuguese rule. César invited the Portuguese writer Grada Kilomba and the American radio activist Diana McCarty to reflect on these images and their history.
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.
Related Programming
Talk: Meteorisations, Filipa César Nov. 20, 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.