Mangrove School, Sónia Vaz Borges & Filipa César et al, video & 16 mm transferred to video, 2K, sound, color, 35’, 2022, PT, FR, SP, GB, DE, Guinea-Bissau Creole ST EN

'We returned to Guinea Bissau in order to research the conditions of the students in the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became students ourselves, and our first lesson was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, to extend your arms forward in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school, learning requires the whole body.'

Sónia Vaz Borges is an interdisciplinary militant historian and social-political organizer. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is the author of the book Militant Education, Liberation Struggle; Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963-1978, (Peter Lang, 2019). She is currently a researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin. As part of her academic  work, Vaz Borges is developing a book proposal focused on her concept of the ‘walking archive’ and the process of memory and imaginaries.
https://www.soniavazborges.com/

Filipa César’s works extends from filmmaking, writing and curating assemblies. She is interested in the fictional aspects of film montage, the porous boundaries between moving image and reception, and the economies, poetics and politics inherent to cinema praxis. César’s research on the imaginaries of the Guinea-Bissau liberation movement, as laboratory for decolonizing epistemologies, begun in 2011 and has been developed into many collective projects such Luta ca caba inda and Mediateca Onshore. Her work has been presented internationally at film festivals, biennials and art venues.