The trio of films presented here by Hope Strickland, Tamika Galanis and Onyeka Igwe traverse different generations and styles of visual representation: from archival footage and documentary interviews to a two-screen video installation. Hope explores the memories of the Windrush generation in elderly care, whilst Tamika’s contemporary interpretation of the archive draws on the nuanced experience of Caribbean Women and Onyeka passes on her Grandfather’s stories of his encounters in Nigeria for future generations. The films are linked through a dialogue between contemporary filmmakers and a commitment to reengaging with the archive.
Programme
Hope Strickland: Home Soon Come (2020, 20 mins)
Home Soon Come is part of an on-going project with the elderly Caribbean community in South Manchester. The film plays between archival footage of the Caribbean islands, domestic spaces in Manchester and scenes shot in a day centre for the Caribbean elderly. It is a film that sits between past and present, with an emphasis on memory-placing through the people around us and what it means to find ourselves at home.
Tamika Galanis: Returning the Gaze: I ga gee you what you lookin’ for (2018, 8 mins)
This film is a response to the United States Library of Congress, home to the oldest collection of motion pictures in the Western world. These moving images give life to still images we are accustomed to seeing in colonial collections; ethnographic in nature, both the films and their descriptions chronicle the imbalance of power enacted upon people of colour whose likenesses were used post-Emancipation to further the colonial project throughout the West.
Onyeka Igwe: the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered (2019, 25 mins)
This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria—retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. So the names have changed tell us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; a story of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown.
Image credit: Home Soon Come, dir. Hope Strickland, 2020