Workshop "Artistic Research as All Bodied Encounter" with artist and film maker Onyeka Igwe
Workshop in the context of Onyeka Igwe’s presentation of her film ‘a so-called archive’ at the Africa Film Festival. In the film, she reflects on the value of archival film footage and its conservation – or rather neglect - in abandoned archival institutions. Using this context, she criticises both the making of its footage as well as the preservation and collective forgetting of these institutions. The premise of this short film, her filmmaking technique and her other projects invite a discussion on her approach to archival practices and their value in decolonised arts-based and arts-inspired research for (doctoral) scholars in humanities, social sciences and beyond.
Critical proximity, a methodology Onyeka developed while working on a PhD has been employed as an artistic research tool. In this dialogical workshop Onyeka will expand on how she is using these methods on a new project on reparations for colonialism and transatlantic slavery.
The workshop is open to master students, PhD students and other researchers in film, drama, theatre (KASK), social sciences and humanities.
Onyeka Igwe is a London born & based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality and co-existence in our deeply individualized world. Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. She is interested in the prosaic and everyday aspects of black livingness. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories . The work comprises untying strands and threads, anchored by a rhythmic editing style, as well as close attention to the dissonance, reflection and amplification that occurs between image and sound. Her video works have been screened at a large range of relevant film festivals and cultural institutions, including MoMA, Black Radical Imagination, the London Film Festival, International Film Festival of Rotterdam, and the Smithsonian African American Film Festival.
Questions? Amanda.adam@ugent.be
