Black Atlantic Visions: A Speculative Continent

My journey towards Black Atlantic Visions started in January 2018, when I was volunteering at the Video Library of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. That was the only way I could afford to see as many films as I wanted and combine my uni work with my volunteering hours. At this time, I was still in the early stages of my artistic research into my Cape Verdean heritage, still negotiating my way as a filmmaker. I was finding ways of interacting with my general and ancestral histories as they were unwritten and largely immaterial due to repercussions of the island’s colonization.

It was then, still gleaning for personal, cultural as well as historical reflections in the world around me, I saw Café com canela (2018). A Brazilian film by Ary Rosa and Glenda Nicácio, about a close-knit Afro-Brazilian community in Bahia, collectively and delicately handling daily life, grief, personal transformations, and ancestral connections. This tender film generously offered a reflection of my state-of-being, my search, as well as a connection to a different yet familiar community from across the Atlantic. Mainly, it revealed to me the importance of cinema in constructively interacting with immaterial colonial heritage and its postcolonial echoes.

Speculative continent

With similar intimate intent, Café com canela is the first film set to screen during Black Atlantic Visions, the programme I curated for Eye’s Programmers of the Future. It is a showcase of contemporary films and video installations from the region also known as the Black Atlantic. A speculative continent with the Atlantic Ocean as its centre, which through sheer colonial violence became a conduit through which the African diaspora (dis)located from Africa, to ‘the Americas’ and Europe. In the absence of traditional archives, these people held onto histories and reinvented cultures through the conscious abyss of the Atlantic Ocean- accessed through their imagination, spirituality, and speculation.

Café com canela is as much a gateway for me to the many Afro-diasporic films that have come from similar inspirations as it is a key for you to enter this program. It comes from pregnant, churning silences, that take up conscious space within our lived experiences as Afro-diasporic people. Silences which philosopher Bayo Akomolafe refers to as ‘the gasp’, a liminal space where magical realism, the Gods and anything too immense and complex to risk categorization resides.

This idea is beautifully illustrated halfway through Café com canela, as Violetta’s grandmother, Roquelina, passes away, peacefully, well-loved and of old age in her bedroom. Her passage to a different world, the ‘Other Side’ is indicated by a simple shot of her bedroom. The only indications of her existence are her unmade bed, her white knitted sweater perched on a chair, and the fresh flower offerings on her altar. The quietude of her loss is only animated by the magical reflection of moving water that comfortingly engulfs her bedroom walls. The borders between this articulated reality dissipate, and multiple worlds melt together with this one.

Opacity

I am still touched by this scene and how this single poetic image bears a particular form of knowledge not only encapsulating the whole film, but particular conditions of postcolonial life, and thus creation. Silent immaterial knowledge, depicted in one poetic image. You will have to see it, as words still fail to describe the density of this scene, as they have failed me throughout this process of creating Black Atlantic Visions.

This all reminds me of philosopher, creative ancestor and fellow islander Édouard Glissant, whose work in Poetics of Relation (1990) helped me navigate this immense source of immaterial knowledge the Atlantic Ocean harbours without access to any traditional archives, books or monuments. Both a graveyard and a site of opportunities. This is where traces of our African ancestors (original languages customs, religions, memories) still reside beneath the waves. Despite violent practices, these people learned how to breathe under these opaque waters and regenerated new populations, cultures, rituals, gestures, and creole languages on new lands surrounding the Atlantic Ocean.

Air conditioners

The Atlantic Ocean, thereby a physical manifestation of this ‘gasp’, consciously gave birth to the constellation that is the African diaspora and Black Atlantic Visions honours this. Considering that, not everything can and needs to be articulated through words. Cinema plays a crucial part in relaying the immaterial knowledge and gasps that despite their variations, connect us all.

In Black Atlantic Visions, tiny currents of these colonial negotiations and postcolonial re-imaginations resurface through the works of contemporary filmmakers, as mentioned before, but also through films such as Atlantique (2019) by Mati Diop, and Air Conditioner (2020) by Fradique from filmmaking collective Geração 80, in which air conditioners, weighed down by mysterious forces, start falling from buildings across Luanda.

While at MACA, Image Frequency Modulation, a 2021 installation by Cameroonian multi-disciplinary artist Ethel Tawe relays ancestral memories and oral traditions.

I invite you to join this rich constellation, by bringing your hearts, your thoughts, and your timelines. May this program be a means through which we melt times together, where we are collectively open to seek and reach beyond the screen and its usual narratives and temporalities, break fourth walls, reimagine the boundaries of sight and sound, as well as blur realities, genre definitions, and medium boundaries. In the spirit of Glissant, may this be a collective moment of bowling water in our hands, slowly letting it drip through fingers back to the Atlantic, just as he intended.

About Janilda Bartolomeu

Janilda Bartolomeu is a film programmer, filmmaker and researcher. She has a Master’s Degree in Comparative Arts & Media Studies. As part of Research & Development at Het Nieuwe Instituut she researched notions of spectrality within the various (post)colonial contexts, as well as the immaterial knowledge production of the Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam, through various film techniques. Her cinematic interests include postcolonial hauntings and memory, speculative genre and finding co-creative ways of film programming. Janilda is currently based in Rotterdam.