12/11
Het Bos
Ankerrui 5-7, Antwerp
‘Geographies of freedom’ (2019, 45’) - Miguel Peres dos Santos
There’s an uncanny kind of shock value to hearing a friendly, old-timey television announcer speak of how the “simple people” of the Netherlands Antilles were rescued from “primitive living conditions” when large oil refineries appeared on the islands, ending their “deficient medical care and lack of hygiene.” This compilation of archival material centering on the neocolonial ties between Dutch multinational Shell and the islands has a knack for revealing these kinds of tensions.
The film is part of a larger collaborative project on concepts of freedom, initiated and developed by researcher Egbert Alejandro Martina and multimedia artist Miguel Peres dos Santos. The project investigates the ways in which geography, architecture, and the law produce ideas about freedom and how those ideas can order physical space. The wider research project takes in many subjects, but always returns to a central idea: that the celebrated Dutch freedom only existed, and exists, via other people’s lack of freedom—whether through explicit slavery or the more pernicious exploitation that is part and parcel of the neoliberal world.
The film is part of a larger collaborative project on concepts of freedom, initiated and developed by researcher Egbert Alejandro Martina and multimedia artist Miguel Peres dos Santos. The project investigates the ways in which geography, architecture, and the law produce ideas about freedom and how those ideas can order physical space. The wider research project takes in many subjects, but always returns to a central idea: that the celebrated Dutch freedom only existed, and exists, via other people’s lack of freedom—whether through explicit slavery or the more pernicious exploitation that is part and parcel of the neoliberal world.
Film of choice: ‘Conakry’ (2013, 10’) - Filipa César, Grada Kilomba and Diana McCarty
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.