Quantum Creole

The first image is in black and white, upside down and projected into a black box that then becomes the frame. It now hovers like a time capsule near a man’s face. He looks down, listening in on a female guerrilla fighter and translating her words from Fulani. Within the capsule, money is counted and paid out as a new currency, the numbers of the years run backwards in the black box. A 16-mm film glides through the man's hands and is transferred to a laptop screen frame by frame.

We went to research the conditions of the students in the guerrilla schools in the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the learners and the first lesson was how to walk. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

The lighthouse, as a man-made object built to shed light into the dark unknown, encapsulates perfectly the desires of the Enlightenment project of modernity: the domination of nature through reason and intellect, the advancement of technology and trade on a global scale, the illuminatory transparency of European Christian morality – a beacon in the dark. This 'op-film' will be a disorienting and disoccidenting dérive from optical navigation to algorithms of locating – an essay against the grain of Western patterns of referencing and situating. From a film made with lenses and ensitive celluloid to the desktop locating engine, we will navigate from the material production of Fresnel lenses to the invention of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) – the tool that announces the obsolescence of the lighthouse.

In The Embassy, Filipa César takes an old album of colonial photos showing landscapes, people, architecture and monuments in Guinea-Bissau in the forties and fifties as a basis for thinking about the codes of representation of former Portuguese colonial power and the way memory is produced. Furthermore, these images are shown by a Guinean archivist who tells the story of his country seen through his own eyes.

Filipa César, in her films and installations, explores the post-colonial constellations that were spawned by the recent history of Portugal. Since 2011, her research is focused on the film production in Guinea-Bissau, the beginnings of which were closely linked to the struggle for liberation. In February 2014, in Birbam, about three hours north of the capital Bissau, for the period of three weeks she has been documenting, together with the filmmaker Suleimane Biai, the construction of a house that will serve the surrounding villages as a meeting space. Alongside his work as a filmmaker, Suleimane Biai is the régulo in this region and hence has assumed the duties of the head and conciliator of the community.

In Porto, 1975 the subjective viewpoint of the camera takes us through another emblematic example of Portuguese history from the 1970s, thanks to a single long take lasting the whole duration of a 16 mm reel. Bouça was a social housing project initiated in 1973, just before the end of Salazar’s Estado Novo, and conceived by an architect whose renown would subsequently become international: Álvaro Siza. César’s camera wanders lightly around the housing development, crosses through an apartment and stops in an architecture agency installed in what should have been the nursery school.

The film-essay Mined Soil revisits the work of the Guinean agronomist Amílcar Cabral, who studied soil erosion in the Alentejo region of Portugal through the lens of his political engagement as a leader of the African Liberation Movement of the 1950s. This line of thought intertwines with documentation of an experimental gold mining site, now operated by a Canadian company located in the same Portuguese region once studied by Cabral. In Mined Soil, the voiceover dialouge explores the space, surface, and textures of the images presented, proposing past and present definitions of soil as a repository of memory, exploitation, crisis, and treasure.

In Cacheu, Filipa César once again applies the economic technique of using a single shot – letting a 16mm film roll to the end – without editing. Here, the montage is a process that takes place before shooting, so that the image produced is the result of a performative assemblage between text, acting, projected image and framing by the cameraman and director of photography, Matthias Biber. A lecture, performed by Joana Barrios, brings together elements of César’s research on four colonial statues, which are stored today at one of the first establishment for slave trade in the West African country of Guinea Bissau – the Cacheu fortresses, constructed by the Portuguese in 1588.

The film INSERT was conceived has part of MEMOGRAMA by Filipa César, an installation that approaches the history of Castro Marim, a village in the southeast of Portugal, known for salt production and as a location for banishment and forced labour. The translation of sin into salt. The film INSERT creates staged images on the landscape of this place and offers a set for the announcement of a forbidden encounter.

The Mediateca Onshore in Malafo, a village in Guinea-Bissau, is an archive and a club for agropoetic practices. As Amílcar Cabral talks feminism on tape, the directors speak in the mangroves about the contradictions of depicting the community.