QUANTUM CREOLE

Quantum Creole is the result of a collective research exercise and incorporate various moving image formats such as video, 16mm and 3D animation, to explore the dynamics of creolisation, in its historical and biological contexts – including the subversive dimension of linguistic codes and notions of weaving.

The punch-card technology, originally designed for textile production, was fundamental for the development of the computer. Its binary code is closer to the principle of weaving than to the act of writing. The weaving of ciphered messages of social and political resistance in textiles or as appropriations of the colonist’s language by the creole are just two aspects of the recent past that help us to, today, think about the new digital economies and their procedures and codes.

The digital visualisation of an ultra-liberal free trade zone’s project planned by multinational companies in the Bissagos Islands, returns us, albeit in a new guise, to the violence that arose several centuries ago with the creation of slave trading posts in an area that was then known as the Guinean Rivers of Cape Verde.

40 min. 
in Guinean Creole, English, German and French, with English subtitles

MINED SOIL

The film-essay Mined Soil revisits the work of the Guinean agronomist Amílcar Cabral, studying in the 50's the erosion of soil in the Portuguese Alentejo region through to his engagement as one of the leaders of the African Liberation Movement. This line of thoughts intertwines a documentation on an experimental gold mining site, operated today by a Canadian company and located in the same Portuguese area once studied by Cabral. The reading of the essay explores the space, surfaces and textures of the images, proposing past and present definitions of soil as a repository of memory, trace, exploitation, crisis, arsenal, treasure and palimpsest.

34 min.
in English & Portuguese, with Portuguese & English subtitles

BIO

Artist and filmmaker Filipa César is interested in the porous boundaries between the moving image and its reception, exploring the fictional dimensions of the documentary and the economy, politics and poetics of cinematic practices. A large number of her films are focused on the ghosts of resistance that lie at the center of Portugal's geopolitical history. Through the creation of performance spaces she proposes a subjective approach to knowledge and questions the production mechanisms of epic national tales, such as the erasure of events concerning minority populations.

Since 2011 she has made several films that use as a matrix the first steps of resistance and liberation cinema in Guinea Bissau, such as the fragments of a lost heritage for which she endeavors to resuscitate its potential via a process of collective research (“Luta ca caba inda”, “The Struggle is not yet over”). In 2017, “Spell Reel”, her first feature-length film, which follows this adventure, was presented in a world premiere at the Berlinale (Forum), and then in nearly twenty festivals and museums around the world, receiving many prizes. With “Sunstone”, (2018), directed in collaboration with Louis Henderson, she explores a cinema that interrogates the visual technologies of power and the materiality of observation, in the spirit of the works of Harun Farocki.