There is something that has always troubled me about the phrase public broadcasting. Public, as in for the people. Broadcasting, as in sending a signal outward. But a signal always carries content. And content always carries a point of view. For some time, the empire was televised.

The BBC banned advertising from day one. John Reith, its first director general, saw that as a point of principle. Commercial television, in his view, corrupted the relationship between broadcaster and audience; it introduced a third party, the advertiser, whose interests would always distort the message. Public money, he argued, should be tied to inherent ethical values: inform, educate, entertain. A clinical approach.

What Reith understood, and what I think he counted on, is that a space framed as free from commerce is a space where ideology can travel without being identified as ideology. No one is selling you anything. This is simply the truth of the world.

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To understand how this worked in practice, we need to go back to 1933 and the General Post Office.

The GPO was, at that point, the largest employer in Britain. It was responsible for building the country’s national communications infrastructure. Comms points like telephone lines and postal networks. And in 1933, it established a Film Unit, housed inside its Public Relations department.

A film unit. Inside a PR department.

The films the GPO produced, including the celebrated Night Mail (1936), were presented to audiences as documentaries. They were screened in cinemas, in schools, and later on television as factual programming. But they were funded by a government institution, shaped by public relations objectives, and designed to build goodwill. John Grierson, often credited as the father of British documentary, built his entire career within this model. He did not see a contradiction in that. He believed film could serve democratic public life precisely by working within institutions. His legacy continues today through the Grierson Award, which annually recognises the best in documentary filmmaking.

The sponsored documentary model was made to promote a version of the world. That’s the first layer of what I am calling advertising grammar.

Look for 9.15 in the image below, which showcases the impetus for the use of film in spreading scientific knowledge.

From 1939 to 1955, the Colonial Film Unit operated directly out of the Colonial Office’s PR department, sharing workforce and equipment with the GPO Film Unit. The institutional continuity was a coordinated apparatus of public communication, and the CFU was its most revealing arm.

The CFU produced films in two directions simultaneously:

1. Films made for colonial subjects: promoting hygiene, loyalty to the Crown, and compliance with British authority.

2. Films that circulated back to Britain: packaging Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Kenya for domestic audiences. Empire rendered as orderly, productive, and grateful for the arrangement.

This dual circulation is worth sitting with. The same institution was selling the idea of empire to the colonised and to the colonisers at the same time. Different audiences, same grammar.

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In 1940, a film called Mr English at Home was produced by the CFU under the direction of William Sellers. It became a template from which to model everything else that the CFU would make afterwards. Sellers would later appear on the BBC to discuss the directorial vision behind it, screening sequences from the film’s opening moments.

What the opening establishes is a deliberately slow, stripped-back visual language. Static shots held far longer than any British audience would expect. Minimal camera movement. Simple compositions. No cross-cutting, no tricks, no ellipsis. Fades between scenes, but nothing that might disorient a viewer unfamiliar with cinematic convention.

The CFU’s own internal report from East Africa justified this approach in language that is worth reading carefully:

“The characters are few and the scenes remain on the screen sufficiently long for the native to appreciate their meaning.”

Tim Rice, Films for the Colonies, 2019 — Film Rules: The Governing Principles of the Colonial Film Unit

Read that sentence again. Sufficiently long for the native to appreciate their meaning. This theory of the audience assumes the inferiority of its viewers and builds an entire production methodology around that assumption.

By positioning African audiences as requiring special visual tutelage. The CFU justified its own existence as a specialist institution, and the continuation of British imperial authority during a period of war and civil uprising. The film grammar was the argument for the empire.

Sellers eventually formalised this into a set of governing principles for all CFU productions. They are worth reading in full, because they are extraordinary documents:

What strikes me every time I read these rules is how they reveal the filmmaker’s gaze more than anything about their supposed audience. The assumption running through every point is that the people on screen, and the people watching, are pre-modern, pre-literate, and in need of management. The rules do not exist to make better films. They exist to produce a particular kind of spectator: one trained to receive a message without questioning its source.

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At the start of this essay, I said the BBC created a neutral space where ideology could travel undetected. I want to make that concrete now.

Advertising does three things. It creates desire. It manufactures legitimacy. And it works emotionally, it does not argue with you, it makes you feel something before you have had the chance to think.

Run the CFU films through that framework.

Creating desire. Wide landscape shots of Nigerian plains. Voiceover narration describing progress, development, and modernity arriving. Empire is rendered as beautiful and inevitable. You are not being asked to want this. You are simply being shown a world in which it already exists and functions well.

Manufacturing legitimacy. The documentary form, observational, unscripted in appearance, seemingly without agenda, lends credibility that a straightforward advertisement cannot. The camera, we are taught to believe, does not lie. That belief is the mechanism.

Working emotionally. These films produce what I would call affective consent. A feeling of reassurance, of pride, that the British project abroad is rational and benevolent. That is what the best advertising does. It deposits a feeling and leaves.

This history would be easier to contain if it stayed in the past. But the BFI holds these films. BFI Replay makes them available. Institutions programme them into public screenings, educational curricula, and anniversary retrospectives.

When that happens without critical framing, without naming what these films were doing, who made them, under what brief, for what purpose, the archive becomes a showroom. And curation, whether we acknowledge it or not, is a form of endorsement.

This is why I use the watermark: this is a British Empire advert. It’s more of a label than a provocation. The ambiguity of the word advertisement is intentional.

Is it propaganda? Yes.

Is it a sponsored film? Yes.

Is it nation branding before the term existed? Yes.

Is it an advertisement for an idea, the idea that the empire was natural, necessary, and good? Absolutely yes.

All of those things are true at the same time. And none of them is neutral.

The BBC’s ban on advertising kept commercial interests off the screen. But it left the door wide open for something far more powerful, ideology dressed as public information, empire sold as common sense, and a visual grammar so well constructed that we are still, in many cases, watching without knowing what we are watching.

The archive is an ongoing broadcast. And we are still its audience.

Archives Die

Archives Die is our YouTube channel

It’s where cinema is used to examine history through the critical analysis of archival footage. These archives consist of historical video records that offer insight into places, institutions, and communities, such as Nigeria, India, and the Congo.

Follow our narrator as they explore how culture, working life, and family dynamics are portrayed in decades-old footage.

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Increased mobility as a small team of filmmakers has been a core part of my trajectory. I find a similar arc when talking with artists working in music videos or dedicated DOPs for commercial shoots.

When reading, take into account that I am speaking from the perspective of an independent filmmaker. I usually work alone, or with a second person, and lucky if I have three. I hope to work with more people (do reach out if you want to work together). Because of this, I am always looking for ways to develop my arsenal for further enhancement of creativity, efficiency, and transportability. The latter is best solved with a car, but you can also do so with additional accessories.

The Orbit

With your camera you can show the event from emotional point of views by means of orbital camera movements, often the orbital movements itself cause the emotional point of view within an event while the filmmaker is a harmonious part of the event without interfering.

Single Shot Cinema: a different approach to film language

Recently, I have been toying with the idea of motion shots: Car shots - with the camera on the bonnet, or the camera looking through the passenger window; tracking shots - say tracking of a runner or a dancer; or shooting a whole war scene.

Notice the contraption, it looks like a tripod turned handheld with a stabiliser attachment holding the camera, or something close to it. This video came to me at exactly the right moment, when I was sitting with a decision between two different paths forward. Both would increase my mobility. Both are expensive, though film equipment is an absolute pocket-sore regardless. What struck me about this video, shot in Ethiopia, is how much it illustrates what mobility actually unlocks. Increased access. The ability to move with people, to follow them into their world. For a filmmaker working with a socially engaged lens, that’s not a technical upgrade; it’s the whole point.

I’ve been shooting dancers, and I keep running into the same wall. Dance demands motion, and a camera on a tripod can only repackage that as stillness for so long. Good handheld operation gets you somewhere, but I wanted more control over the shake and not just less of it.

A technique I’ve been using, without any rigs at all, is slow-motion as a stability tool. Shooting at 60fps on a 30fps timeline means the footage is stretched across twice the time, and the inherent jitter gets stretched with it. It’s a genuine trick. But it has a hard limit: what if the scene can’t be slow motion? What if there’s sound? Stretch the footage, and you stretch the audio with it, and that’s rarely recoverable. I needed something else.

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What is an Easyrig?

An Easyrig is essentially a vest with a boom arm that runs over your shoulder, suspending the camera in front of you on a bungee-style cable. The weight transfers from your arms to your torso. That’s the whole idea. For a camera operator carrying a heavy setup all day, it’s the difference between functioning at hour eight and not. For me, working lighter, the appeal is slightly different as it’s about what it does to the image. When your arms aren’t fighting the weight, the camera floats. In an organic way and not the clunky precision of a non-human. The movement starts to resemble how the eye actually moves through space.

What is a Flycam?

A Flycam is a stabiliser, a handheld rig with a counterweight system below the camera that uses momentum and balance to iron out shake. Think of it as the mechanical predecessor to the gimbal. Just physics with the motors, almost like a plumb line in engineering. Getting it balanced correctly is its own craft, and operating one well takes real practice, but when it works, the footage has a quality that’s hard to replicate digitally. There’s a reason they were the industry standard for decades before gimbals arrived, and a reason some operators still prefer them. It’s funny as I write these words, now my walks down the street involve spotting who’s got the latest flycam or easyrig. The mind likes to reveal what it represents most visibly in your third eye.

What is a Gimbal?

A gimbal is a motorised stabiliser. Three axes of movement: pan, tilt, and roll. Each is controlled by a motor that counteracts any unintended motion in real time. Point it where you want, walk, run, turn, and the camera holds its position regardless of what your body is doing. The learning curve is shorter than a Flycam, the results are more consistent, and the footage has a specific look: glassy, smooth, almost frictionless. This is both its strength and its limitation. Sometimes you want a little friction. The biggest learning curve is more about the initial balancing act of the camera along the three axes. Once mastered, this machine quickly becomes a versatile tool. I used it recently for a Sudanese fundraiser where I was able to follow the movement of the children involved in the performance ceremonies.

What accessories can you get for a Gimbal?

This is where it gets interesting. The gimbal on its own is a tool for smooth horizontal movement, but pair it with the right accessories and the range of what you can achieve starts to expand significantly. A follow focus lets you pull focus remotely while the gimbal is in motion, something that’s almost impossible to do manually at the same time as operating. DJI Lidar Focus system takes this accessory to the next level, allowing precision sensitivity to the movement of the locked subject. This is ideal for cameras with dodgy auto focus, or even manual lenses, where external focus control is needed for extra oomph.

An external monitor means you’re not squinting at a small screen trying to frame a moving subject. For DJI, this can come in the form of the Transmission module. Extension poles let you drop the camera low to the ground or push it out over a space. And then there are mounting systems, car mounts, suction rigs, and clamps that take the camera off your body entirely and put it somewhere the shot demands.

What happens if you connect the two?

This is the question I kept circling back to. What if you mount the gimbal to an Easyrig instead of holding it freehand? On paper, it sounds redundant, two stabilisation systems doing the same job. But in practice, they solve different problems. The Easyrig removes weight and transfers fatigue. The gimbal removes shake and controls the axes. Together, you get a rig that can move through space for long periods, with a camera that stays locked regardless. For tracking a dancer, following someone through a crowd, or moving through a location continuously, it starts to open up shots that would otherwise require a dolly, a crane, or a crew three times the size. For a filmmaker working alone or nearly alone, that matters. There are examples of this

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Affordability

I hate this reality. The equipment above will set you back a minimum of around £500, and comfortably up to £2000. Affordability is the biggest obstacle in filmmaking. It was built as an industry inside a money economy, which is why Hollywood only makes what returns a profit. For the small team, the only way through is smart decisions about when and how you spend.

Staggering purchases is the most common-sense approach. Buy a little today, a little tomorrow, and slowly the kit accumulates.

Renting is a reasonable solution, and one most filmmakers lean on at some point; it lets you access equipment without the upfront cost. But it adds weight to pre-production, delivery costs money, and if you’re working abroad or off the beaten track, finding rental stock gets complicated fast. You solve one problem and welcome several others.

The approach I’ve settled into is working with clients to acquire equipment on a project basis. As relationships with collaborators and clients deepen, and trust in the work builds, you gain leverage to have more ambitious conversations. A request to shoot a dance film becomes an opportunity to restructure the fee, part for your time, part toward the equipment the project actually needs. Some clients will cover the full cost, others offer a contribution. Either way, it’s a useful filter: the ones willing to invest in the tools are usually the ones who genuinely believe in what you’re making.

There’s also the option of buying outright. As a registered sole trader or limited company, equipment purchased for work is a legitimate business expense, deductible from your annual tax. The savings feel delayed, but it’s real, and it’s the most straightforward way to build a professional kit over time.

Affordable Alternativos

A fabric camera strap is the most versatile and cheapest mobility upgrade there is at around £15, and I’d recommend one even to someone running the latest motorised rig. It creates two points of contact between the camera and your body, distributing shake across the strap before it reaches the lens. You move more freely, swivel more naturally, though slow and controlled movement still matters.

The cine saddle sits in a different category. It’s a one-time purchase, around £300, sometimes less if you find a dupe on Alibaba. It looks like a glorified cushion, which is essentially what it is. The camera rests on top, the saddle hangs from a neck or shoulder strap, and the whole system distributes movement across a wide area. The stability is genuinely good. It can also function as a car mount through a longer strap stored in a hidden pocket. It folds flat, travels on a plane without issue, I’ve used mine as a pillow, and once you have it, you have it. No accessories, no recurring costs, no ecosystem to buy into. The main problem I’ve noticed is that a bigger camera can sink so deep into the cushion that you get a raised piece of fabric entering the frame, which is a problem specific to this product and not experienced anywhere else...ever.

With these notes, I hope you find time to gather your thoughts. No equipment is ever a waste, for even the regretful purchases teach us something, but let’s try to make a small plan, as there’s a lot to buy, especially if you want to shoot a war scene.

Further Reading

• Read more about LiDar Scanners

• Single shot cinema: a different approach to film language

Equipment Listed

• Easyrig

• Flycam

• Gimbal

• Camera Strap

• Cine Saddle

I want to encourage a way of thinking that frames the camera as a tool for seeing. This is not a new idea. I first started to consider this train of thought after reading the writings of Maya Deren, the French surrealists, and Jonathan Beller, who shared ideas about the engagement cinema has with reality. In the case of Deren and the surrealists, where you find a deep engagement with consciousness, and for Beller, an engagement with the capitalist modes of production. This new knowledge foregrounded my readings of Deleuze, who focused on the separation of the time image from the movement image. This all aligned as I started to explore ethnographic filmmaking: a colonial type of filmmaking birthed alongside the channels of the western explorer, set out to document their escapades.

On the cover of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, witness the above. The book goes on to highlight the idea that seeing occupies a space of ambiguity and certainty. We think we know what we believe we see. Now, apply that credence to aesthetic works, and a whole heap of confusion comes into play. Berger focuses on fine art paintings, which play a useful role in onboarding the reader for a type of sensation. When we look at things, we engage with multiple layers of knowledge, the physical conditions that allow us to transfer information across space to interpret the spatio-temporal position of an artwork. This collides with knowledge transfers regarding the aesthetic hybridity of the artwork: the idea of recurring themes, symbols, or easter eggs. Berger highlights how adults are more likely to engage with this way of seeing, as it requires an element of stopping and sitting with the seeing. Think of a tour around a museum. To stop and look at an artwork, letting the mind wander. For children, this can be difficult, as you could argue that they experience the physical conditions more viscerally, without the mediation of knowledge, like the symbolic order of subjects in the frame. This acknowledgement, you might say, is a thinking through artworks. Philosophers might argue that this phenomenon persists in reality itself. But in my case, I like to draw this parallel more to cinema.

Cinematography was directly advanced in the service of medical and scientific research. After the invention of the Cinématographe in the 1890s, the Lumière laboratory in Lyon turned its attention to tools for scientific enquiry.

Whether Lumière was motivated by the commercial potential of the science market or by a genuine philosophical alignment with material realism, the link between cinematography and science was direct: it allowed the documentation of the body in motion. To advance cinematography was to advance the possibilities for capturing life on earth. These properties slowly shift as cinema enters public space. Through the screening room, moving image migrates from science into popular culture, and with that migration comes the possibility of shaping consensus.

The birth of the internet accelerated the impact of video on consciousness. We began to morph into the screen. Streaming platforms, tools that claimed to democratise the video creator, all of it worked to flatten the moving image and, with it, the mind. But when you look at the history of cinema, the mind and the moving image were always entangled. Cameras were invented partly as a workaround for drawing. They offered a visual eye to those who lacked one. Henry Fox Talbot, who developed the Daguerreotype process, called his earlier prototypes photogenic drawing processes and openly admitted his failures as a sketch artist. In this sense, the camera was always designed, in some way, to replace the eye.

This extends into anthropology as the ethnographic camera starts to form. Ethnography is the study of the cultural and ethnic properties of a group of people. It’s a form of studying humans, and one that was greatly advanced through the use of moving images. I like to think of it as visual anthropology. Emerging in the 19th century, this was also a time when the colonial man ran riot around the world. Films like Nanook of the North show us the output of this era, where films poisoned by the biases of their makers screened with falsity around their representations of truth, only revealing an exotic performance to the Western gaze.

That performance finds its most devastating parallel in the life of Sarah Baartman - the bodacious South African dressed in flesh-coloured tights, forced to tour Europe to perform in the circus. I think the short-lived acting career of Safi Faye, particularly in Jean Rouch’s Petit à Petit is apt here; her life shows her defiance to the final image, which highlights her rejection of the representation of identity on camera.

What I am trying to say is that the camera, designed to replace the eye, in the hands of the ethnographer, became an extension of the colonial gaze. It therefore aligned with the zeitgeist of the time with regard to the identity of non-Western people. Stuart Hall led cultural studies on representation, and his work highlights how identity is not an essence but a positioning, one that must be continually re-articulated across history, representation, and fantasy.

“We have been trying, in a series of metaphors, to put in play a different sense of our relationship to the past, and thus a different way of thinking about cultural identity, which might constitute new points of recognition in the discourses of the emerging Caribbean cinema and black British cinema. We have been trying to theorise identity as constituted, not outside but within representation; and hence of cinema, not as a second-­order mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby to enable us to discover places from which to speak. Communities, Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities, are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined (1982, 15). This is the vocation of modern black cinema: by allowing us to see and recognize the different parts and histories of ourselves, to construct those points of identification, those positionalities we call in retrospect our “cultural identities.”

Stuart Hall. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. p.267

Like Stuart Hall, Safi Faye understood that the camera does not document reality, but reality is repositioned through the lens. The instability of identity can be managed by creating films that engage with stories of the past and questions for the future. Re-presentation can involve an engagement with the technical to achieve a satisfactory alignment. I think of the Shirley case at Kodak, where early celluloid processing was unable to photographically represent black skin as its standardised skin tone was referenced off a model called Shirley something. In this case, any attempts to use the camera to re-present black skin were arguably doomed, unless shooting in monochrome. So it’s good to know some technical, as long as it supports your goal. Safi Faye went on to train as an ethnographer, as she wanted to acquire the technical language of the visual anthropologist so she could take control of her own representation. Her philosophy shines through in Mossane, which depicts a woman contained by society’s perception of her beauty; trapped between two worlds, the human and the spiritual. The very existence of this film is an act of rebellion.

The role of the camera continued to serve communities during the world wars. Ex-colonies were able to sharpen their tools because of scholarships from Russia, which played a massive role in disseminating art education to challenge the Western powers. This sets the landscape for a way of seeing that engages with the reality of capitalism. Where concepts of audience participation become of greater importance. Think the voice over there to guide the audience down a linear route in comparison to slow cinema, where the viewer’s eye, and subsequent mind, are encouraged to wander and think. This approach can be seen in the 1928 russian film by Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, a silent film that coined the idea of the kino-eye, which is a way of seeing with the camera, where Vertov believed in capturing things that were “inaccessible to the human eye. He saw the camera as not optimum in recreating what the human eye saw, but through editing fragments, he could create montages that could activate a new type of perception.

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Georg Simmel’s observation about the money economy is useful here because it explains something about how cinema gets made. Under a money economy, the conditions that produce a thing become invisible; what you see is the finished object as opposed to the labour, the relationships, or the decisions that brought it into being. Hollywood is perhaps the clearest example of this. The blockbuster arrives polished and total, its apparatus hidden. You’re there to consume it, popcorn and all.

The unconscious of objects that can be revealed optically is precisely the relations of production that ordinarily are represent or invisible… because the acted cinema mystified the relations of production
Jonathen Beller. The Cinematic Mode of Production. p.43

Acted cinema (narrative) made within this system actively mystifies the relations of production. It performs their absence and fights against the Hollywood approach. The camera, which Vertov believed could reveal what the human eye could not, is turned instead toward concealment. This is the tension at the heart of commercial filmmaking: a tool capable of exposing the world is used, more often than not, to smooth it over. I often dwell on these thoughts when I consider my place in the commercial world.

The response to this, historically and practically, has been to step outside those structures entirely. Independent filmmaking is a different relationship to those means of production. When you control the camera, the edit, the distribution, and the story, you are making decisions that a studio system would make for you, and usually in someone else’s interest. This is what draws many filmmakers, like myself, to work outside the industry: poverty autonomy.

For a small team, or a team of one, self-organisation is less a philosophy than a daily practice. It means knowing your equipment well enough to move fast. It means building a workflow that doesn’t depend on infrastructure you don’t have. It means making the constraints generative rather than limiting. The filmmakers I admire most tend to work this way. I think of Mother Vera, a film that was shot by a two-woman team with a small camera rig.

But Self-organisation, taken too far, becomes isolation. The other thread running through independent filmmaking, and through the broader history of cinema outside Hollywood, is mutual aid: the idea that filmmakers share resources, knowledge, and access, as a catalyst for collective survival.

This shows up in practical ways. Equipment shared between collaborators. Skills exchanged. A network of people who show up for each other’s shoots because they know the favour will be returned. Think the WhatsApp contact that can get you any rig. Or even that Discord group offering discounted prices on gear. The Russian film schools that disseminated education to ex-colonial filmmakers were operating on a version of this logic, the redistribution of technical knowledge as a political act. African filmmakers were taught in these schools under that logic.

For me, this is where the theoretical and the practical fully meet. The camera as a tool for seeing is only as powerful as the community of people using it with intention. Working alone is sometimes necessary. But the work I am most proud of has always involved other people. Communities that offer presence, trust, and a willingness to be seen. I recall a project, Hostile Housing, where active participants engaged in workshops to produce a film about the social housing crisis. The lead filmmaker brought his own kit: Sony FX5, Sennheiser shotgun microphone, and a film tripod. Participants were all given chances on each piece of equipment as a form of knowledge sharing. That was one of my earliest lessons in film. The final moving image was completed in 2022 and aired at the London Short Film Festival in 2025.

So when I say thinking through cinema, I am talking about replacing your eye to create images that go beyond realism. I am talking about allowing your camera to embody your philosophy. From the subjects you shoot to the collaborations you hold. It’s a way of looking that encourages you to interrogate reality by changing the shutter speeds on life to create the world you envision. Thinking through cinema allows your cinema to become reality.

References

Reading

• Maya Deren. An anagram of ideas on art, form and film

• John Berger. Ways of Seeing.

• Gile Deleuze. Cinema 2, The Time Image

• Stuart Hall. Cultural Identity and Diaspora.

• Lisa Cartwright. Screening the Body. C. Science and Cinema

• Jonathen Bellor. The Cinematic Modes of Production

• Corrigan. The Essay film from Montaigne to Marker Vertov to Vada

Cinema

• Dziga Vertov. Man with a Movie Camera. 1912

• Berry Kroeger. Nanook of the North. 1922

• Jean Rouch. Petit à petit. 1970

• Safi Faye. Mossane. 1996

• Cécile Embleton, Alys Tomlinson. Mother Vera. 2024

Artworks

• Stacy Lynn Waddell. Goldenhot Butterfly. 2022

• Muybridge. Athlete walking with a fifty-pound weight in one hand. 1887/1901

• Sasha Huber, Tailoring Freedom – Renty and Delia, 2021

As the second son in a family led by a mother who migrated from Nigeria with hopes of raising doctors and lawyers, I was already veering away from an expected path. My father’s absence meant our home was shaped by a kind of domestic matriarchy, while the world outside still felt structured by male authority.

At that time, I felt an innate need to understand myself. Working with my hands and translating ideas into 3D form, offered a way to do that. Through making, I began to let go of the need to intellectually define everything, opening instead to a different kind of understanding.

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In The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work (2021), it is argued that

“Long practice and accumulated experiences progressively fine-tune the craftsperson’s somatic perception to the present task, enabling the confident performance and the rapid, responsive recalibration of the tool-wielding body that qualifies the ‘expert’” (p.211)

This idea of somatic perception suggests that repeated bodily engagement reshapes how we experience the world. Rather than passively representing reality, perception is enacted through movement, touch, and material response. Our sensitivity to texture, sound, and resistance becomes a form of knowledge. Concepts like repetition become more important as we start to see that repeated bodily engagement can form a highly trained sensitivity.

In my own work, this developed as a sensitivity to stone. More recently, through my work in cinema, I’ve explored similar processes with sculptors working across wood, textiles, digital textures, and bio-based materials. Setting the specific material aside for a moment, what interests me here is the mind–body connection. Contemporary approaches to epistemology often situate knowledge within systems of logic, mathematics, and science. In contrast, I want to consider the role of craft in mediating the relationship between mind and body.

Take craft tools as an example: a tungsten‑tipped chisel. Phenomenologists such as Merleau‑Ponty describe how tools can “withdraw” from conscious awareness and become incorporated into our body schema. In this state, the locus of perception shifts outward into the tool itself. As with the example of a blind person’s cane, the tool is no longer experienced as separate, but as an extension of the body; similarly, the craftsperson comes to perceive through the chisel and the stone it encounters.

My commitment to crafts should be understood as a commitment to knowledge production. Over time, through repeated engagement and material‑focused research, my beliefs about the causes of my experiences and about what counts as success or failure become guided by craft knowledge. This evolving framework for understanding is what I think of as Thinking Thru Sculpture.

Reading: The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work

Watch: Bill Bailey’s Master Crafter 2025

Funding my MFA has meant being able to produce work without fear of financial survival. I have struggled to talk about this because I have felt disconcerted towards my privilege in being eligible for funding. But after sharing a recent post on TikTok about some wins where I highlighted in brief my scholarship at UCL, I have been inundated by the wave of interest in the topic.

This process supports any creative practice, and at times can involve steadily waiting for the right opportunity. Before the MFA, I was accepted into a Data Science Master’s - this too was funded, but I swerved the decision at the last second. So funding can relate to any course. It really is a game of identifying the programme you want and finding a way to make it work. But there are some key shifts in politics that are worth considering, which can make your research a little varied.

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Historically, funding has been about philanthropy, where the really wealthy support pots to fund a particularly gifted student’s entry into a programme. This concept is heavily tied to meritocracy and has gaps in its attempts to tackle inequality. Though useful to many, it creates more competition than opportunities.

Funding is a way to build equity in education. Whether you agree with the mantra that everyone has the same 24 hours in a day or not, funding at its core recognises the need to widen participation in education activities. That being said, institutions are designed to make money. Because of this, they have a corporate responsibility as well as a social responsibility. Understanding this will help you understand how to search for funding. As it can often involve understanding your socioeconomic position in relation to a set of available opportunities, if a university is to fund you, what are you allowing them to fulfil in their institutional responsibility - whether corporate or social? This phrase corporate social responsibility is a deliberate one with a distinct meaning. It refers to the business model of companies to operate in ways that enhance society and the environment. Universities have these statements1 on their websites, too. Granted, as an educational institution, they can use the term Civic and Social Responsibility. Learning about the responsibility that your ideal university has will help you understand how best to fund your programme, as each year the particular focus of that responsibility may shift slightly.

The influence of globalization, especially the period starting from the twenty-first century, explicitly showed that universities have begun to implement tasks that could be considered as nontraditional when compared with the nature of these institutions. These tasks were Corporate Social Responsibility – A Global Perspective usually inspired by the spirit of university social responsibility aiming to alleviate societal well-being and facilitate industrial development.

Corporate social responsibility : a global perspective / edited by Muddassar Sarfraz and Kashif Iqbal.2

In this perspective, if a University has a high intake of foreign students, it is its civic and social responsibility to widen the participation of home students by analysing the admission data to help develop solutions that produce a more balanced output. This might look like creating a new course. If a university launches a new campus in a new part of the city, they have a civic and social responsibility to support the participation of locals from that area in the admission and general engagement with its activities. You can see the pattern. Sometimes, finding a way to fund a programme can involve understanding how a university has been developing its business model. Some universities rely on foreign students, while others accelerate expansion by building on profitable land. I am interested in learning more about other models.

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It is also important to understand the role of the government in all of this. Though institutions function as independent bodies, there is a direct relationship between education and fiscal prosperity. A more skilled workforce is a more specialised one, and governments know this. It means that when the economy is under pressure, funding is directed toward the skills and disciplines the government sees as strategically important for economic growth.

During COVID, for instance, research revealed that scientists reviewing data were transferring their own biases into their results. This pointed to a broader need: science had to be grounded in social and anthropological thinking, so that researchers could interrogate their assumptions more critically. In response, government funding began supporting programmes that trained social science students in more technical methods, bridging disciplines that had previously been kept apart. This is how I was planning to fund the Data Science course.

That shift also changed how arts and social sciences were valued more broadly. The pandemic had demonstrated, in real time, that ethnographic and qualitative knowledge mattered, that understanding human behaviour and context was not a soft add-on to hard data, but essential to it. In response, universities including Oxford, Goldsmiths3 and UCL began offering programmes by practice for the first time, where students could be assessed on creative output rather than just essays or technical tests. This was significant. It created a genuine bridge for social science and art students to develop more freely within academic institutions.

I think the above sets a useful foundation. Because, as you search for funding, the first question to ask yourself is: what social responsibility does an application like mine fulfil? You might be a female student, a home (national) student, or a student from a specific local area. UCL, for example, offers scholarships to individuals based in East London as part of a widening participation scheme tied to their expansion into the east. Eligibility might involve attending a primary or secondary school in the area, or living there for five years or more. I also recently saw a PhD fund4 at King’s College designed entirely to build bridges across the African diaspora, favouring applicants from African backgrounds and asking only for evidence of interest in an idea. And there are more unexpected routes too, a religious arts fund, for instance, that supports painters in exchange for producing work in a traditional devotional style. This is how Michelangelo funded his studies.

There are multiple ways this narrative can play out, and I do not think it serves anyone to approach funding as a one-size-fits-all process. My successes have come from making my goal fit the funding criteria, not the other way around.

In my programme, I knew that I wanted to develop my creative practice. I had skills in filmmaking, but was unsure whether a dedicated filmmaking course could support my needs. All I knew was that I wanted to continue creating in an interdisciplinary way. I decided to apply to a film course within an anthropology department, at a strong university, where the fine print reads by practice. This meant I would be granted creative freedom to submit works pushing the boundaries of cinema, and that ultimately, I could bring any element into film, even if this wasn’t written explicitly in the course description. A course defined by practice5 means that your creative output is your evidence. You are not confined to an essay or a technical test. The work itself makes the argument.

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Timing is everything. The first thing to get used to is that this will take time. Don’t expect to solve your MFA needs overnight. Competition is high, and you will need to accept that perhaps your application simply isn’t ready yet. That’s okay. It took me two years to prepare for mine. But that time spent sharpening your lens, chisel, or pen will be used to steadily build evidence that you are the right person to fund and support. You might find you’re ready sooner than you think, or you might change your mind entirely in that time, which is equally valid.

If an application has a fee you can manage, I would apply anyway, just to see what happens. Beyond that, I would focus on finding the fund that best matches the course you want, and alternatively, finding funded courses where the learning can be shaped to match your actual goals. This might look like taking a Visual Anthropology course when what you really wanted was filmmaking at a standard film school like the NFTS. Or a Disability Design MSc if your heart was set on Design Engineering. In these adjacent spaces, I have found that there are far more available resources to execute your dream project, partly because no one else is looking there. This way of thinking opens you up to more ideas, too. You start building bridges where there need not be walls.

From across the Atlantic, we can hear the cries of the stolen, captured, and lost. In the centre of Greenwich Museum’s Ocean Court space stands a global map. Blue lights circumvent its flat-sphere marking the ground, one lumen at a time. Mood plays an important role in EVEWRIGHT’s work. By engaging with the history of the Zong massacre, we find that it all becomes about mood. How to prepare: the viewer, the museum, and the world?

What is the story of Zong?

The Zong Massacre is an erased and under discussed part of history. Never truly acknowledged, never truly memorialised. It was the name given to a slave ship. At its peak, the slave trade was the most profitable mode of business. The industry was so sophisticated that ships built with the sole goal of transporting enslaved people across the Atlantic were also insured as acceptable cargo by maritime companies. It is this insurance that both leads to and reveals the tragic incident.

In the last weeks of 1781, the crew of the Zong, a Liverpool-registered slave ship, had thrown 132 Africans overboard to their death. The ship was en route from Africa to Black River in Jamaica, had overshot its destination and was running short of water….The atrocity might have passed virtually unnoticed but for one extraordinary fact: the syndicate of Liverpool businessmen who owned the Zong took their insurers to court to secure payment for the loss of the dead Africans.

James Walvin. 2011, The Zong: A Massacre. p. 1.

This raised legal disputes as British critics were captivated by the polarising nature of the incident. It became highly visible, highly political, and ultimately led to the abolition of slavery. But the lives lost were never truly accounted for. Maritime deaths are an official process, names are marked according to a list, recorded and documented for the future. The Zong had no such thing. Today, visual representation of the ship takes on the form of a painting.

This is the only great work of Western art ever made to commemorate the Atlantic slave trade. It conveys a sailing ship in the distance about to be engulfed by a typhoon. In the foreground, black people are drowning in the turbulent ocean. In the middle of the frame, the sunset parts the dark ocean. Turner was aware of incidents like Zong, but also:

That the Atlantic slave trade continued despite the Anglo-American abolitions of 1807 and 1808, and that enslaved Africans remained victim to periodic acts of atrocity on those later clandestine foreign (Spanish and Portuguese) vessels)

Ibid. p. 5

In this way, the painting functioned as a memorial to those that were lost at sea for economic gain.

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What was the exhibition Unbroken?

I was lucky enough to visit Unbroken, 2025. during the studio’s residency at National Maritime Museum. The residency is built around an artist’s exploration of the museum archives. If London is a capital of a maritime matrix, then Greenwich is the key player. As a museum, this is evident in the collection which explores varies eras of shipbuilding, dockyard life, and the world wars. For the residency, the artists focused on documents relating to the massacre.

I have discussed the idea of challenging documentation about the past. I look at thinkers like Kafka to showcase the role of power in systems of knowledge, showcasing this philosophy in my film Archives Also Die, 2025. In this case, the craftsperson chooses to challenge the knowledge accessed through documentation by making something in response, or as a way to research. This is similar to Keith Piper's work. I too have experienced this and feel that the best way to sum it up is that history can be boring, tragic, and every other emotion humanly possible. Engagement with that history involves finding ways to sit with the knowledge. I have found that making, given its material connection to time: the use of our hands, the cleaning up of an area, the thinking process behind planning an idea. All of this tricks your mind into sitting with the knowledge. I find sometimes that when I read words, I am able to recognise the signifier to create a thought, but am unable to maintain prolonged engagement with the knowledge gained from that thought. The history of Zong is a trauma that lives on because it was never really put to rest. Unbroken was an artist’s prolonged engagement with this trauma.

The exhibition featured poetry from Ionie Richards, of EVEWRIGHT, and plaster based sculptures from Everton that reimagined the £££KISSIPENNY$$$, a currency used to trade enslaved africans. Both mediums visually represented as banners that hung above the Ocean court showing the art objects on the interior, and life size charcoal drawings on the exterior, only viewable from the ground floor. During this residency, various events were workshops were held that explored deeper concepts of the black body, water, and movement. Things like life drawing, and performance art were re-presented as motifs to draw the viewer deeper into the exhibition. The movement of charcoal to document the black body as it glided across the map print on the museum floor sets the stage for engagement with this history. Accompanied by sounds of the crashing waves encasing participants, the addition of a poetic rhythm guided sketchers along the readings from Ionie. I don’t know if this experience can ever be repeated.

My serendipity continued in attending EVEWRIGHT’s studio. There Everton suggested a parallel, now front of mind. Holding a beaten book of photo reference, clutched firm in charcoal-coated hands, he asked: what do you see? The pages showed maritime officers in their formal dress. Peaked caps. Double-breasted coats. Epaulettes marking rank. The uniform of someone whose authority over bodies at sea was total and legally sanctioned. Then he said: it's ICE. And the connection landed not as metaphor but as fact. The tactical vest, the cap, the insignia of rank, the visual language of someone whose authority over bodies in motion is total and legally sanctioned. Centuries apart, the grammar is the same.

What are the parallels with ICE?

The contemporary ICE practice turns the movement and confinement of racialised people into a site of profit where law treats them as expendable, not fully human, in ways that normalise preventable death. This was the sole goal of Zong.

The uniform materialises power. The ship’s captain held absolute legal authority over who lived and died at sea. The uniform materialised this power, distinguishing those who commanded from those who were cargo. On the Zong, Captain Luke Collingwood’s decision to massacre the enslaved people was made from within that structure of command. The uniform was the visible grammar of that hierarchy. The ICE agent uniform also works as a marker of militarisation. The visual shift in immigration enforcement towards tactical, military-style dress is documented and deliberate. Tanya Golash-Boza’s work on immigration enforcement, and reports from the American Immigration Council, touch on how this aestheticises state power. Even in the case of the detainee where ”at Berks County Prison (BCP) in Leesport, Pennsylvania, detainees are given only one uniform and must sit around in their undergarments for two to six hours when they send their uniform in for washing.” Golash-Boza, T.M. (2012). p. 40

People become cargo. In the US, racialised groups of people in its custody are formally recognised as persons, but processed as detachable “units” within what scholars call an “immigrant‑industrial complex”, where detention beds are quotas to be filled and bodies are revenue streams for private prison contractors. The immigrant industrial complex is the infrastructure that makes this profitable.

The movement of cargo makes profit. Immigration detention is similarly tied to profit, though in a different legal form: private prison companies and local jails are paid per detainee per day, creating financial incentives to expand and prolong detention as a form of incarceration business.

Laws are made to reinforce the systems continuity. Today, immigration law constructs migrants as deportable and detainable in ways that routinely override broader human rights norms. After a 2025 Supreme Court ruling, ICE agents have even been empowered to use race as a basis for immigration stops, and some Black lawmakers have explicitly compared these practices to “modern‑day slave patrols,” highlighting how law sanctions racialised policing of movement. Reports by the UN and human rights groups point to arbitrary detention, family separation, and dehumanising treatment as systemic, not accidental, signalling a legal framework that creates categories of people who can be deprived of liberty with fewer safeguards.

The designs of containers advance to hold more cargo. In ICE custody, people describe being kept in freezing, overcrowded rooms with constant fluorescent light, sleeping on concrete floors, with limited access to toilets, hygiene, or medical care. These conditions contribute to what some scholars call “slow death”: in 2025 alone, 32 people died in ICE custody, the agency’s deadliest year in two decades, and deaths have continued at an alarming pace, prompting concern from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

A key difference is that the Zong massacre was a single, spectacular act of mass killing in a context where open, direct violence was routine and legally protected, whereas ICE’s violence is more often bureaucratic and dispersed over time, through denial of health care, indefinite detention, or deportation into danger, though there are also individual killings and cases of overt brutality. Still, many abolitionist and migrant justice organisers deliberately invoke the Zong and the slave ship more broadly to argue that any system that cages racialised people for profit and treats their deaths as collateral is part of the same historical continuum, even if the legal categories have changed.

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How can we engage with power through material exploration?

EVEWRIGHT gives us the response to systems that erase by making something that refuses erasure.

Plaster: malleable enough to be shaped, yet hardening to a strength sufficient for lasting form.

Accessibility was the reason behind this choice, and accessibility should remain front of mind for any sculptor thinking seriously about their practice. With ideas of access come ideas of longevity, of how to manage what flows in and out of the studio. Applications to residencies and commissions become opportunities not just for creative development, but for restocking materials. The act of managing supply quietly shapes how regularly a material can be explored. It demands a long-term commitment: which materials are worth building a practice around?

This is a challenge the artist knows intimately. The workshop: the conventional infrastructure of sculpture is not always accessible. Plaster solved this problem.

Typically a building material used for coating walls and ceilings, or casting decorative elements, plaster becomes something else in the hands of a sculptor. The process works like this: a design is first modelled in clay, then encased in silicone to create a negative, a mould. That mould can then be filled with plaster to produce a precise, one-to-one recreation of the original form. The clay thinking, now made permanent.

Why plaster? Largely composed of gypsum, lime, and cement, it offers a set of properties that are quietly radical for an independent practice. It is cheap. It moves through states, from fluid to firm to solid, with a responsiveness that rewards experimentation. Once set, it is durable enough to handle and light enough to transport. It is a material that meets you where you are, rather than asking you to build an entire infrastructure around it.

Sources

EVEWRIGHT Studio
https://evewright.com/

James Walvin. 2011, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery. c. Painting Slave Ship. p. 1 https://archive.org/details/zongmassacrelawe0000walv/page/n3/mode/2up

Golash-Boza, T.M. (2012). Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions, and Deportations in Post-9/11 America (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/10.4324/9781315634036. p. 40

Documents relating a case in the Court of King’s Bench involving the ship ZONG.
https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-500960

The world stopped for a moment as my body ascended, legs flailing across the road, landing haphazardly on my XL Telfar bag, cushioned with the cinema camera that was neatly tucked in its compartments.

This all happened on Sunday, at the crack of dawn. I had built a relationship with the routine of morning shooting. Anything to avoid people, less about my social anxiety, and more about avoiding over-performance from passersby around film crews. Filmmaking in public has always had the gravitational force of attracting strangers en masse. The good, the bad, and does the above count as ugly? I’ve had the range: from speed-invitations to Lake Como, to citizens’ arrest muppets threatening to call the police because, apparently, filming a block of council estates is illegal. I digress, and on that fateful day, I was cycling to my next scouted location, wistfully avoiding any commotion.

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This was short-lived. A tragic ending to say the least, as a maniacal driver speeds down the opposing lane, swerving in my direction, then out, at the very. Last. Second. I was scared for my life, visibly shaken, as I turned in my attempts to document the license plate of this lunatic. He was a danger on the streets and needed to be reported. It should be unanimous to cyclists around the world that agility is greatly limited on a bike. Now, add my film equipment to that equation and picture my U-turn, a mere snail on the road of reckless rabbits. By the time I had ended my manoeuvre, the vehicle had returned for more. My time for evasion was slim, and I knew the bike was no longer useful in this situation, for I was being attacked. This was a direct attack.

Under this threat, we choose one of three. I didn’t really have time to make a decision as the vehicle started to reverse into me, dodging it at the last second. Fitness has always been a lifeline for the black community. Growing up, I watched the classics: Love and Basketball; Coach Carter; Remember the Titans. These films show people how fitness can get them out of situations. You might damn well be close to failing your whole school year, but if you’re physically fit, you might actually be okay. Growing up working class also meant that my home was broken, my mother working until late hours to keep the energy bills maintained. This isolation meant that I threw myself into fitness even more.

I think this sustained relationship saved my life on the day of the incident. I was leaping for the stars, evading every attempt from my invaders. After their reverse, they accelerated at the human in front of them. I find it insane that any person would look another one in the eye, as they sit behind a wheel, and would dare hit that acceleration pedal. It happened in Marylebone a few days ago. That person in front of that car is no longer with us. In my case, I suddenly found myself atop the car bonnet, confused at what I was witnessing, and startled by my uncanny reactions.

Growing up in Hackney as an illegal immigrant in the noughties meant that I have been desensitised to the violence that poverty catalyses. Before citizenship, my family stayed with a friend whose children were involved in some classic London antics. Gangs burst into the homes of suspected competing gang members, only to find out that they got the wrong home. Police raiding family homes in search of drugs that get rapidly flushed down the pipes. I don’t think this prepared me in any way for what happened on that horrific day, but it deprogrammed my mind from the initial shock that someone might feel when bearing witness to the sick, twisted evil that consumes a human behind a vehicle to attack a pedestrian.

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A near-death experience will either change you for the good or for the bad. After the incident, though hit, I suffered no critical injuries. I have been working steadily with the police and other medical services in search of justice. Through this experience, I have learned to understand my perceived position in this world. Questions like ‘Did you know them?’ ring through my head, echoing the words of many friends who felt compelled to enquire. I mean, I get it. Why would the perpetrator do that if I did not know them? Unfortunately, I did not know them, plain and simple. My feeling towards this question is that this represents a wider engagement with the colour of my skin. It is a symptom of my blackness that compels the viewer to ask such a question. It is the precursor to ‘it’s some gang shit’, the meta-text to ‘you brought this on yourself’.

In addition to challenging sustained doubt from the world, communicating my struggle to medical services has been like poor Sisyphus, rolling that boulder of injuries up the hill of ‘you look fine’. I think an anecdote might help here. During my recovery, I was blessed to pet-sit a therapy dog - a red Labrador - during our walks. We met a white woman walking her cat. I know, who walks their cat? But she apparently had time to, and well, was walking a damn cat towards me as I walked my friend’s therapy dog. The dog went for the cat, and the owner was displeased, eventually picking up her cat, which continued to resist and scratched the neck area of its owner. I was ashamed but ultimately injured because I was recovering from being attacked by a car. She, however, was frantic, pulling the arm bands of her dress outwards following the direction of her shoulders that got tighter to each other, screaming demonically, ‘LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO ME.’ This contrasts to my near death experience, where in fact, I was too chill interpreting that, I 100% underplayed the severity of that incident to the medical services, and I have been trained to get on with it. I like to think about what the reaction of that woman would be to a similar car incident. Perhaps a prolonged wailing, perhaps a completely mute era lasting, say, 6 months.

This experience has brought back memories that I thought layed dormant. Though a slow recovery, I have started to better understand how society has made me feel because of the colour of my skin. I make art to create without boundaries. As the world attempts to place boundaries around me, I continue to push back, showing the world what people of colour have done and continue to do. Because of this, I have had to develop a strong sense of self. Resistance and resilience are deeply ingrained. For Sylvia Wynter, it is intergenerational. I can only talk about my home and my mum is the most resilient person I know. After the incident, my self image was shattered.

The word trauma vibrates through my eardrums like a crow circling carcass. Every medical specialist has used that word to describe my experience. I second it, but was not keen to associate the two. I am still in shock even in writing these words, but I find that the writing helps me identify the words that seem to have escaped me. I completely lost track of my schedule after the incident. Deep as I approached the last term of my masters, the final submission a 40-minute film documenting the creation of a stone plaque. I couldn’t even recall the name of my film. I birthed its name, and couldn’t even recall it’s signifier. This happened with a lot of projects where I was a bit lost for words and actions. It’s been a few weeks, and I am still adjusting, but I have learned to accept support. The sustained shock I have felt has meant that I grow anxious towards situations that put my body at risk.

A near death experience invokes the feeling of loss, then takes it away, just to show you that it could all go in a second. This reality shattered my self-confidence, which was built up after steady growth and achievements. Now, I feel weak. I feel vulnerable. I feel unfit. I severely injured my leg during the incident and was unable to walk for some time. Though no critical injuries, the added mental weight of dealing with a physical detriment for more or less the first time in my life, brought to light the fragility of life. In this way, my worldview has changed. Now shy of risk and fearful of maniacs, the world feels new to me.

I hope to engage with these ideas further through sculpture. What it offers is a chance to engage with materials that break and bend to form bodies of mass and shapes. I see a lot of crossover to the incident and I am currently working on some designs, exploring questions that might help communicate this feeling of fragility, risk, but also balance. The balance of good vs evil; risk vs challenge; Mind vs Body.

We hosted a workshop. Scholar Asif Shakoor in conversation with Dr Georgie Weymss discussing forgotten seafarers from South Asia. Lashkar.

This project looked into the British Empire and the role of South Asian Seafarers. Through a creative walk, led by Asif, we explored the history of areas like the Royal Docks, the role of Lashkar, and their place in academic research.

At UCL Marshgate, we screened Stranger’s Home, 2021. This documentary is a helpful resource to raise awareness about a history that was not well documented. A lot of the relevant monuments no longer exist, and documentation of this history was not prioritised, despite the efforts of the seafarers during the great wars.

After watching the film, we walked over to UCL Poole street for a Q&A. Dr Georgie Weymss has supported Asif Shakoor in academic settings, as an academic ambassador and friend. Her research explores notions of bordering, legislative laws, and dual concepts of invisibility. For instance, she talks about the bordering existed inasmuch as it involved seafarers travelling across the borders to enter the UK, as well as the limited labour upon their arrival where they could only work along the borders of the docks. Her writing can be found online and is very much worth reading further, as our description only scratches the surface of a very deep tunnel of knowledge.

This series will focus on building a bridge into the crafts world, for those wishing to follow sculptors, often people I have worked with, friends, or otherwise people I respect. I hope this source of knowledge, compiled for access will support your engagement with the crafts.

This idea grew after publishing videos online, I started to receive commentary asking for the relevant links. Though answering to the best of my ability, it was clear after closer investigation with artist-acquaintances that in fact crafts people do not share their work enough. They frequent in market sales and international events showcasing their work, but for those stumbling on the work of, say, Donald Baugh, to search those names online to no avail is an experience this list will tackle.

In some cases, my studio will be working with those artists to manage their digital activity, in other cases, we will simply point you in the right direction. I also hope to make this a monthly commitment, excluding the holiday season.

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Mark Manders: Room with All Existing Words

London Mithraeum Link
12 Walbrook London EC4N 8AA Map

The Black Atlantic Makers

Crafts Study Centre Link
Falkner Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7DS Map

Additional Artist Info(s)

Donald Baugh Instagram

Marcia Bennett-Male Instagram / Website

Keith Piper Instagram / Website

Dame Magdalene Odundo Instagram

Bisila Noha Instagram / Website

Tapestry of Black Britons Instagram / Website

Ronald Moody Website

Dislocations: Rachel Mortlock & Harry Grundy

New Art Projects Link
Ground Floor 357 City Road, London, EC1V 1LR Map

Veronica Ryan: Multiple Conversations

Whitechapel Gallery Link
77-82 Whitechapel High St London E1 7QX Map

Donald Locke Resistant Forms

Camden Art Centre Link
Arkwright Road London NW3 6DG Map

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I have come to recognise a kind of power within women. I have always sensed it. Growing up with a single mother, I remember her forgoing lunch to prioritise my brother and me. So yes, I have long known it to exist.

More recently, though, I have witnessed this power more clearly. There is a moment of transformation when someone shifts from uncertainty to complete focus. It made me ask, what changes? What acts as a catalyst for that kind of growth?

There is no single answer, and reducing it to one would be a disservice. What does stand out is the role of self-belief and self-perception. The idea that “you can do it” can push people beyond hesitation into action, into a kind of productive intensity that builds bridges where others saw only gaps.

Having seen this first-hand, I am aware of the role I can play: creating space to support bold ideas, or simply offering what skills I have. It doesn't take much. Small gestures, consistently offered, can move something forward.

I find myself thinking about what it means to be alongside that kind of growth by making room for it. To say yes when it matters, and step back when that matters more.

Witnessing this has made me more conscious of the space I take up, and the space I can help open up for others.

Pairing this text with Bisila Noha’s pots, they celebrate overlooked female potters felt right. The story goes that Noha was enthralled by images of two-legged vessels that circulated on the internet, with no clear artist name attached. To later discover that these works were by Kouame Kakahá, a contemporary female potter from Tanou Sakassou (Ivory Coast). She continued by embarking on a journey to connect with the Ivorian potter, finally meeting her at the Pottery Cooperative in Tanou Sakassou. I’ve spoken her work before.

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Our second edition of New Alterations brought together new faces from across disciplines, glasses of house pinot grigio in hand, gathering around audiovisuals that turned to movement, activism, and Toni Morrison’s Sula. The evening opened with Nuotama Bodomo’s Boneshaker (2012), which places a nomadic family at its centre. Told through the eyes of a young girl born into a life of endless journeying, the family, dressed in their Sunday best, search for spiritual awakening. The blessings of Jesus Christ rise in chorus with words spoken in tongues, the ale-sheh-ku-bakoos swelling to a crescendo as olive oil from the Virgin Mary touches their foreheads. This surreal vision, perhaps echoing Nuotama’s childhood, has the quality of a coming-of-age tale, as though revelation is imminent. Instead, it leaves us in a space of uncertainty, with more questions opened than answered. The short film can be viewed on Nowness.

With the atmosphere set, we shifted to Lydia de Matos’ Sex Drive/Deathdrive (unreleased), shared through a password-protected Vimeo link. This dance film explores movement through sharp, minimal editing choices that insist on economy. A single spotlight transforms a bedroom into a stage, its corners becoming sites of disappearance and return. Our events create space for filmmakers to discuss their practice, and Lydia spoke about her performers moving with the intention of being edited. Their gestures were not confined to the language of dance alone, but entered into dialogue with the camera. Cuts track the body as it vanishes from the light, slips out of the frame, and exits through a darkened doorway that at moments resembles the edge of the screen itself. Shot in 4:3, the chosen ratio strengthens this illusion. The production spanned two days, one for choreography and one for filming, with post-production ongoing. Lydia also described her use of data-moshing, a process that disrupts digital files and distorts pixels, the technological equivalent of scratching celluloid. Here, Python was used to manipulate the data of the MP4 file, creating a raw digital texture.

The programme continued in Lafayette, Louisiana, guided by a voice in darkness. A southern accent, soulful and searching, draws us in as Aunt Bobbi recalls her love of reading, a hobby that planted the seeds of escape. Wessley Edmonds’ she knew me before i was born (2025) is a work of personal reflection, an homage to her mother’s late teacher. Aunt Bobbi’s words reveal a restlessness: she was never ‘happy living in Louisiana’. This longing sits in contrast to excerpts from Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), where naming, identity and intersectionality expose the weight of oppression on the Black community. Morrison’s misnaming of characters and her use of repurposed names demonstrate the power of identifiers in shaping autonomy. Edmonds pursues similar questions through film. The signifier of her name becomes a vessel for attachment, anchoring intimacy through distance. Aunt Bobbi dreams of leaving Louisiana, a desire that extends her autonomy beyond the self, even in the face of community resistance. The film withholds visual imagery for the first minute, a gesture of restraint. Once images appear, they show family photographs and domestic interiors, echoing Aunt Bobbi’s memories. Gradually, the focus shifts from the household to the wider world. Louisiana has long been home to some of the highest poverty rates among the Black community, and to ‘Cancer Alley’, an 85-mile corridor of petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River. Edmonds’ camera begins inside the home, then looks outward to reveal the systems that weigh on it, sketching the long struggle of the Black community against exclusion from White America.1

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The evening closed with Great Okusun’s Incarcerated Roses (unreleased), which confronts the UK police system and its treatment of Free Palestine protestors. Composed as a rapid montage of mixed-media footage, moving from camera to phone, the film propels viewers into the immediacy of protest. Okusun, an emerging documentarian, spoke of the challenge in handling such emotionally charged material. Hours of raw footage had been cut down to a five-minute extract, an act of distillation that shaped fragments into coherence. After the screening, the audience reflected on the symbolism of house arrest imposed on one protestor, a gesture that collapses the distinction between private and public confinement. The film, still in its earliest stages, retains the roughness of unpolished rushes, yet its urgency and intent were unmistakable.

New Alterations remains committed to creating space for emerging filmmakers. At whatever stage a work finds itself, from raw footage to refined edit, we welcome it. With time, with conversation, and with a glass of wine, we aim to support the practice of filmmaking. Cinema is consciousness, and we strive to be conscious viewers of it.

Imagine a fisherman moving upstream in search of foreign waters, casting a wide net and drawing fish from warm, exotic seas to fill his basket. He returns home satisfied, only to find families of fish trailing in his wake, carried by the current. In a sudden panic, he wades back into the water, hoisting placards in defiance: “We want our sea back!”

On 13 September, three million pairs of far-right shoes stamped through Central London, fuelled by anti-immigrant fervour. The UK’s history of legislating immigration is far from noble. Nadine White’s directorial debut, Barrel Children: The Families Windrush Left Behind (2023), casts a piercing light on the human cost of the 1971 Commonwealth Immigration Act, when Commonwealth citizens began to lose their automatic right to remain. The film turns its gaze to the children left behind in the wake of the HMT Empire Windrush’s arrival at Tilbury Docks. These ships were built for workers, not families. At an economic crossroads, Caribbean parents made the devastating choice to leave children in the care of grandparents while they sought wages abroad.

The “barrel” became a symbol of that migration. New trainers, tins of food, and small luxuries were packed and shipped back across the Atlantic, proof of economic survival, but also a thread stitching families together across oceans.

Barrel Children creates a rare space for honesty, where speaking the unspeakable becomes an act of survival. The film also features Blacker Dread, a successful DJ whose personal story exemplifies resilience and the ongoing impact of transatlantic migration on identity and community. His presence reminds viewers that these histories are not only lived in memory but continue to shape contemporary culture and artistic expression.

Through the documentary’s talking-head testimonials, we encounter the concept of serial migration. Unlike a single relocation, serial migration unfolds in stages: a parent leaves first, the child follows years later, sometimes decades. White balances the cruelty of these separations with a fragile hope, the hope of reunion.

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Colonialism sits at the root of this story. When Britain colonised the Caribbean, it extracted both land and labour. Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None provides a lens for understanding how colonial and racial hierarchies have shaped global systems, including the displacement and exploitation of Black communities, offering a broader theoretical framework to situate the experiences of Caribbean migrants. The economic necessity of leaving children behind was not a private failure but a structural one, shaped by British law and soft power.

White’s film does not stand alone. Across the globe, artists and filmmakers have examined similar patterns of forced or strategic separation. Grant Gee’s The Gold Machine (2022) confronts the colonial project in Peru and its impact on the Asháninka people. Géraldine Berger’s Sankara’s Orphans (2022) documents how, during Burkina Faso’s revolutionary period, hundreds of children were sent to Cuba for schooling, only to struggle with reintegration upon return. Danae Elon’s The Rule of Stone (2024) reveals how British policy forged Jewish identity around Jerusalem stone as an economic tool. These works, like Barrel Children, reveal how political and economic forces uproot families and reshape identities.

White’s film also resembles psychotherapy. In conversation with Dr Elaine Arnold, it excavates intergenerational trauma and a collective amnesia. Therapy, long stigmatised in Black communities, becomes a mirror: the refusal to process pain surfaces instead as overwork, self-hate, or compulsive striving.

As someone born in the UK to immigrant parents, I recognised myself here. Even after gaining citizenship, my sense of belonging was unsettled. The simple intimacy of a white British family sitting together at dinner; talking, debating; felt foreign. I was raised to move quickly, to stay vigilant, to brace for instability. My neurotic pace became a coping mechanism, perhaps sharpened by London itself.

One participaWessley Davidson, recalls being brought to the UK while siblings remained in Jamaica. His sense of a grandparent was second-hand, pieced together from stories. He “knew lots of [his] friends’ grandparents, and what that was like,” but his own connection was imagined rather than lived. That gap, the excitement of what should have been felt, replacing the feeling itself, embodies the psychic wound of separation.

Barrel Children creates a rare space for honesty, where speaking the unspeakable becomes an act of survival.

I was reminded of Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s Farming (2018), which tells of Nigerian children fostered with white British families as a survival strategy. That experiment bred its own neuroses, echoing Fanon’s idea of the Black body in a white mask.

White’s film reminds us that these separations were not individual misfortunes but the outcome of legislation and empire. Their legacy persists, most recently in the Windrush scandal, which once again placed long-settled residents in jeopardy.

The march of September 13 ignores this history. Britain once beckoned workers from abroad with promises of opportunity. Like the fisherman who cast his net wide, it cannot now feign surprise when families, carried by the current, arrive on its shores.

Thanks for reading,

Tosin

References

Barrel Children: The Families Windrush Left Behind, 2023, Nadine White

A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2018, Kathryn Yusoff

The Gold Machine, 2022, Grant Gee

Sankara’s Orphans, 2022, Géraldine Berger

The Rule of Stone, 2024, Danae Elon

Farming, 2012, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

Read Nadine White’s Substack

Barrel Children’s Substack

Here are updates, behind-the-scenes insights and historical context from 'Barrel Children: The Families Windrush Left Behind', the award-winning documentary by Nadine White that uncovers the hidden legacy of the Windrush era.

By Barrel Children by Nadine

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Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972) marked a groundbreaking moment in global cinema as the first feature film directed by a Black woman. Set against the backdrop of Angola in 1970, the film follows Maria’s desperate search for her imprisoned husband, unfolding a narrative that interweaves gender, class, and anti-colonial struggle. Through Maria’s journey, Maldoror exposes the complexities of self-determination and the untold perspectives of those silenced under Portuguese colonial rule.

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Comparable in its symbolic force is Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1975), in which an African Socialist’s impotence on his wedding night—caused by the titular curse—becomes an allegory for political corruption and cultural dislocation. Women in the film embody symbols of defiance and continuity. Rama, the protagonist’s daughter, stands out: draped in Wolof cloth beneath a map of Africa and speaking her native tongue, she becomes a figure of cultural resistance. Sembène’s critique does not spare African nationalists, Christianity, or Islam, holding African socialism to the same scrutiny as European colonial ideologies. Unlike Soviet cinema, which was tightly bound to state propaganda, these filmmakers developed a cinematic language untethered from regimes—trained in Moscow yet committed to their own radical critiques.

This refusal to replicate Soviet propaganda underscores the political agency of African filmmakers during this period. Their critiques were unsparing and equal-opportunity: imperialism, socialism, and imported ideologies were all subject to interrogation. Maldoror’s influence proved enduring, paving the way for directors like Safi Faye. In Mossane (1996), Faye challenged the ethnographic gaze long cast upon Africa. Presented as a folkloric legend, the film revolves around Mossane, a young woman whose beauty provokes conflict within her village. By framing beauty as both sacred and sacrificial, Faye turns the male gaze back upon itself, interrogating power and desire through a distinctly female perspective. Like Eisenstein, she wrestles with the idea of freedom, but her lens is grounded in women’s experiences, subverting male-dominated traditions of cinematic thought. Faye’s trajectory—from ethnographer to actress to filmmaker—enabled her to position herself in direct opposition to the Western exoticist gaze, reclaiming African cinema as art in its own right rather than anthropological documentation.

A fearless figure standing among giants, Sarah Maldoror embodied the very determination her characters depicted. In Sambizanga, Maria navigates an unfamiliar city with her child and a young companion, seeking her husband whose fate is sealed by the colonial prison system. The narrative concludes with the revolution moving forward despite personal loss, symbolised by the appointment of a new leader and the persistence of the messenger—an embodiment of struggle continuing beyond the individual.

This legacy of defiance also finds expression in Maldoror’s collaboration with Aimé Césaire on Et les chiens se taisaient (And the Dogs Were Silent, 1976/1978). This short film adapts Césaire’s theatrical work into an existential meditation on rebellion and colonial oppression. Filmed in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris—a site filled with colonial plunder—the dialogue between a rebel and his mother resonates among African sculptures, turning objects of colonial display into silent witnesses of resistance. The film captures extracts from Césaire’s long poem, where a revolutionary contemplates his life and imminent death in the face of collective catastrophe. In bringing this text to screen, Maldoror not only amplified the Négritude movement but also expanded her political cinema into new experimental territory, where literature, performance, and film converge to confront colonial violence.

Together, these works demonstrate Maldoror’s singular commitment to cinema as a vehicle for both personal and collective resistance. Her films, alongside those of Sembène and Faye, created a language of liberation—interrogating structures of power while insisting on African self-determination, imagination, and voice.

Films mentioned

• Sambizanga (1972) – Sarah Maldoror

• Xala (1975) – Ousmane Sembène

• Mossane (1996) – Safi Faye

• Et les chiens se taisaient / And the Dogs Were Silent (1976/1978) – Sarah Maldoror

A hands-on workshop where participants created soy wax candles while engaging with stories of social justice campaigns and memorial practices. This workshop transforms a craft activity into a meaningful act of commemoration and solidarity. It was hosted in-person at Rich Mix in East London.

In the distant land, horns toot as vibrations from sanai echo across the empire. Noise is one way to separate the west from its foreign counterparts. The Song, 2022 by Bani Abidi shows this concept well.

In our latest event, we screened The Strangers Home, 2024 by James King, a film commissioned by Thames Festival Trust. It deserves the big screen and surround sound—an eerie mood swept viewers into a world shaped by identity, censorship, and fake news.

One moment that stood out was a simple newspaper cutting, now a powerful node in the symbolic order crafted by the ‘other’ to present South Asians as lesser-than. It showed an abstracted group of global majority children, captioned:

The great majority…of the children…are of every conceivable hue

Originally published in a national newspaper, this cutting highlights how media participates in knowledge production—framing and shaping reality.

I’ve experienced something similar. During an interview at my youth centre, we spoke about class, gentrification, and community resistance. But in The Guardian, my words were reduced to the headline ‘gangsta’—a lazy stereotype, flattening us into the tired narrative of Black kids not working.

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Through this work, we’ve gathered cultural leaders from East London—representatives from SOAS, Museum X, UEL, UCL, and local groups from Tower Hamlets and Newham. It was a profound moment of generational knowledge-sharing. Elders broke bread with younger generations. We plan to keep building in this spirit.

The walking trail took place in the Royal Victoria Docks. While heritage protections remain, only two landmarks connected to South Asian histories have survived. A bitter reminder came at the trail’s end—a walk to a phantom landmark, empty of meaning.

We must acknowledge the work of Johnny Ringwood—an advocate for dockworkers and their stories. I received news of his passing today. Rest in Paradise. He played a key role in commissioning Les Johnson’s Dockers sculpture, which still stands in front of the Excel building. While it sheds light on aspects of the docks’ history, it leaves out South Asian workers—underpaid, overworked, and largely forgotten.

This conversation is one of heritage. South Asian seafarers deserve a protected landmark in the Docklands. One existing gesture is Lascar Avenue, which presents the illusion of heritage. In the image below, we find its Urdu root—Lashkar. Scholar Asif Shakoor has called for the road sign to be changed, restoring the word before it was anglicised into Lascar.

During the conversation, Dr Georgie Wemyss introduced a set of useful books which extend the discussion:

1. Ayahs Lascars and Princes by Rozina Visram

2. Across the Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers by Caroline Adam’s

3. Chains to Lose Memoirs of Dada Amir Haidar Khan

4. Sons of the Empire Compiled by Yousuf Choudhury

5. Globalising Labour: Indian Seafarers and World Shipping by G. Balachandran

Two standout organisations emerged from this research. Swadihata Trust created the first walking trail in my area, and The Travelling Archive produce high quality field recordings from Bangladesh.

Field Recordings from Bengal

For this event, we also 3D-scanned a model ship created by Artist Researcher Remiiya Badru. These scans later featured in the promotional poster.

Up Next

• The team are working towards digitising the current trail, offering a new way to engage with the research

• More events, a large programme involving Remiiya’s walking trail

• Continued support for the battle to memorialise south asian seafarers throughout the docklands, London

• Digitising the current trail to offer a new, interactive way to engage with the research

• A full programme built combining Remiiya’s and Asif’s walking trail

• Continued advocacy to memorialise South Asian seafarers across London’s Docklands

Today, seeking refuge can create the dual experience of breaking the mind-body connection, which stands in contrast to its more traditional outcome of physically moving from one place to another. Taking its origins from French and Latin, I was raised to see refuge as a form of retreat, running back, or seeking safety. Globalisation with advanced developments in tech has changed this, so I think a review of the applications of refuge in the contemporary world is long overdue.

I recently lucked out in joining a Cognitive Science of Focus workshop where keynote speakers shared tools to help attendees tap into the strength of their memory to boost cognitive function. Here, the multipurpose phone was highlighted as a tool that stifled focus - something commonly agreed upon across global cultures – perhaps, a necessary evil. What stood out in this talk was the speaker's careful manoeuvre from our need to check notifications and its cognitive link to safety. In current psychological studies, phone addiction — which can be defined as excessive use of gaming apps, social media, and immediate engagement with phone notifications — can lead to ‘switch cost’. This effect describes our lack of attentive focus when in the same room as our phones. Studies relate this to the frequency of notifications, and the notification trigger type: whether vibrate, silent, or ring. I have issues with how this view places our relationship with the phone at an inherent fault, that as a Human race, we have tended towards some state of decline because of this new tech. Challenging this view in part was the description brought to light at the focus group, which acknowledged our dependence on the phone, but instead highlighted this as a safety mechanism. In this view, we develop a dependence on this tech because we condition the behaviour of expecting news, of any kind, to come first through our phones. This description shows how I hope to reframe refuge in today’s world. When we condition the behaviour of expecting news, refuge comes from the shift of not being on our phone to being on it. Understanding this can be found in the unexpected. Over time, we have learnt to dwell on our existence. Something that started after the Second World War, and has continued throughout globalisation.

The second world war ended at Hiroshima and left nations at the end with their need for power and our responsibility to Earth. Soviet Russia started funding Afro-Asian conferences to help their pursuit of independence1; whilst America took every measure needed to stop the formation of communism. In this way, thinking about existence was more prevalent than ever. The world started to shrink as globalisation accelerated rapidly, advancing industries like transport, energy, and advertising. As a people, our thoughts began to converge towards a universal consideration of time and attention in response to our existence. What do I mean by this? As the industry advanced, new currencies formed. New predictors arose, like carbon emissions that could be used to measure the life expectancy of the planet Earth. New money-making opportunities arose. In advertising, whoever could monopolise the time and attention of application users won the bid. In the factory, like toothpaste manufacturing, whoever monopolised the time and attention of outsourced labour-power won the bid. In this way, our focus as a people shifted towards a consideration of time and attention. Acknowledging this shift made you more money. Because of this, our relationship with Refuge shifted.

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Whereas before seeking refuge involved a movement from an old place to a new one; today refuge involves shifting our time and attention away from one thing to the next. Take our phones, every day we clutch them tight for fear of the worst outcome. A few weeks ago, I lost my phone, which left me still, not knowing what to do. But in the same way, that we develop a conditioning to a habit in the above example, so too do we continue this through other examples. Through hobbies, seeing friends, and passing time. With each activity that we give a little time and a little attention, we muster more refuge amongst a sea of social dependencies. Because in concrete cities like London, at a stage where the social standard has reached par with New York, the behaviour we have conditioned is that of citizenship, and so the time and attention we give to other things works as a refuge away from this role.

Technology can be a nice way to frame our thinking. Because of it’s man-made properties, we can identify it as something different to nature – separate and distinct. I have recently been enjoying ‘Silo’ on Apple TV. A series depicting a post-apocalyptic society advanced in underground survival. They live sheltered from the outside world, their only sighting of the outside being from the ultrawide window panels on the perimeter of the subterranean structure. Through these windows, truth is built. Whenever a citizen leaves the silo, they walk outside with a limited amount of oxygen, after each step, slowly leading to their impending doom. Everyone that leaves, dies; and everyone that dies, does so in front of the big window-like TV. We later find out that these windows are TVs, and that tech plays an intermediary role in circumventing the citizens' idea of truth. This example for me highlights the illusion tech can play on us. Our relationship to truth has been conditioned by the habits ingrained in us from society, throughout our childhood to adulthood: what is seen as the right thing to do; or how to do that thing. As the world has gotten smaller, tech has played the intermediary in distributing how to behave. News travels TV, the internet, memes, billboards, advertising, and social media – all advancements in tech. This distribution of things does not leave us helpless. In Silo, the real battle began after the mechanics in charge of the power to the entire structure decided to take control by turning off the power wherever they saw fit. Similarly, as we choose what to focus our time and attention on, each moment becomes a memory of refuge. Moving through space is how it started. Thinking through space is how it continues.

As technology advances, it will become increasingly difficult to identify where technology mediates and where we take control. Neural Link shows how we can control computer hardware with our brains, while Wi-R will change our interface with broadband connections as we boost connections using electrical charge from our bodies. As someone deeply interested in technology and philosophy, I offer this piece as a reminder that control is always in your hands, though I acknowledge the murky surrounding waters.

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Archives Die is a pursuit towards knowledge production by embracing culture and looking at history. architecture, and art.

In dialogue with Statues Also Die, 1953, this annually published magazine is a call to dismantle the structures that claim to preserve culture while often erasing its living, breathing essence. The magazine will be published annually, but on Substack you can expect weekly reflections on filmmaking methods, research essays on cultural touchpoints, and poetry exploring form.

Remixing archival items is our sole focus.

• We produce new knowledge.

• We create audiovisual works and publish essays.

• We research the intersections of culture, community, experience, and technology.

"The Archives Also Die" is both a rejection and an invitation—a rejection of institutions that position themselves as sole gatekeepers of knowledge, and an invitation to carve new paths, remixing what already exists into forms that speak to now.

Knowledge is not sealed away in drawers or databases.

It is in the food we share, the music we love, the tech we build, the stories we pass down.

To decolonise knowledge production, we must first deconstruct its architecture. We take what was and remix it into what could be.

The absurd power of the archives ran down my native veins, following the trail of oil that led to dreams of home. Growing up in the UK, I remember coming-of-age: returning after A-levels to an unknown letter. Documents granting citizenship. My National Insurance number, the key to taxation. At the time, I used the name Peter, to whom the letter was also addressed. In truth, my first name is Oluwatosin. A fact that later proved detrimental as I spent years untangling government records to correct the name. My full name is Oluwatosin Oluwakayode Ominiyi Temi Tope Peter Adegoke. Yet Peter dominated the first twenty years of my life. Through this experience, I encountered firsthand the absurdity of bureaucracy: the circularity of its logic.

clock in, attempt action, fail, start again, clock in, attempt, enter wrong room, start again, clock in, …

Government ID was essential to access the online portal, a process requiring the generation of a new ID for each session. A system meant to manage taxpayers while preserving freedom. "Stasi or Gestapo officers are a breed apart from the unarmed plod who demands no ID cards from free British people," writes Polly L Toynbee (2025). Now, the Labour government seeks to universalise citizen ID. You could easily lose your Government ID. It was easy to get lost. Kafka's Josef K (1967) faced similar illogic, caught in a bureaucratic maze, filled with "a tundra of pulverizing boredom," as Hitchens (2011) described it. Fisher (2009) relates this to the "crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers." At the British Museum, an older Black male receptionist barked building regulations, just within his authority: “What does that sign say… exactly. So stand behind the line and wait there. I will call you over when ready.” We all waited anxiously. First our IDs, then proof of address, then a photo, taken by another staff member. The first man saw something in me. We talked about the Docks. He repeated this ritual with another customer—an older Black woman.

My body perched, waiting for the second check. Suddenly, a rustic quake hit my eardrums.

I looked up to see a red-skinned, sunburnt, elongated, navy-seal-blue-suit-wearing, high-cheekboned, combovered, dirty-nailed, shoeshined, old-money meandering mind-body of mass. And his thick, wet posh accent—throbbing down my spine.

The final syllable stretched like an elastic sports cap that slowly aches the head but evades detection—forever pervading. He continued,

I was caught off guard. Like spotting a childhood classmate at church. But I do not know you, Sir. No massa, I do not know yer.

Kafka's influence extends to Orson Welles. In The Trial (1967), characters are dwarfed by vast architecture. My visual language mirrored this with long hallways. At the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), hallways abound. There, I confronted the Network: materials only viewable with specific authorisation. Use of “Network” aligns with Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory: "a network is all boundary without inside or outside" (Latour, 1996). GUI (Graphic User Interface) offer a way to reckon with this concept. It is the paint that fills the gaps on the canvas. Like nodes that extend into a tree of knowledge, composed entirely of connections. Adobe Premiere Pro's layer-based timeline, Da Vinci Resolve’s node-tree structure, and Obsidian’s productivity maps all mirror this theory. At LMA, their Account Management System connected to a legacy system that required in-person visits to Farringdon. Deleuze’s rhizome becomes Latour’s network. These concepts were considered throughout the making of the film. They informed my tools for research allowing my workflow to engage with worlds of knowledge, as opposed to a linear timeline of events.

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Time near Balfron Tower, filming for another project, revealed brutalist towers as contemporary castles. Council homes had prestige. Families waited decades. Britain’s welfare state gave birth to these vertical fortresses. Like The Castle by Haneke (1997), where blocking and motion convey Josef K’s existential search, my film was also a search. In creating it, I scripted: “searching for memories of myself” (Artist, 2025). I projected archival objects onto brutalist structures. Collections like the Colonial Film Unit (CFU) are stored across BFI, Bristol Archives, and the Imperial War Museum. Their architecture—brutalist, red-brick industrial, Edwardian baroque—mirrors hegemonic power. See Robert A. Caro (1974), Ismail Kadare (2000-2023), Ken Follett (1989), and Rule of Stone by Danae Elon (2024). Concrete, especially in London social housing, becomes a material metaphor. Architecton by Viktor Kossakovsky (2024) also represents high-rise concrete blocks in Ukraine. My own childhood in social housing became the foundation for connecting personal stories with colonial collections. This creative thread was sewn early.

Mapping this connection led to an investigation into imperialism. The research question evolved into: what role do archives play? In Exterminate All the Brutes (Peck, 2021), a colonial scene is curated by a white photographer. Through this staged image, viewers are encouraged to interrogate the media and its truth claims. Lindqvist (1996) reminds us, “Too many Europeans interpreted military superiority as intellectual and even biological superiority.” Colonial narratives were always epistemological. Donna Haraway’s ‘modest witness’ critiques this blind factualism. The witness becomes “an authorized ventriloquist for the object world” (Haraway, 1997). Her challenge: knowledge must include marginalised voices. The essay film provided such a space. Organisations like TRACTS nurture this kind of experimental research-led cinema.

I began screen recording archives. A low-res necessity due to prohibitive access fees. The Nigerian archivist Didi Cheeka shared his frustrations: Nigeria has struggled to screen CFU content due to licensing costs. This issue intersects with identity. Colonial archives manufactured false meaning through imagery. We must now challenge those meanings through public programming. Fanon writes, “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things... and then I found that I was an object among other objects” (1986, 109). Where Darwin theorised man, Fanon theorised the colonial man. His psychoanalytic work revised Jung’s collective unconscious, showing how marginalised groups possess a dual consciousness—Black labour vs. white capital. The archive can destabilise this cultural conditioning.

Foucault calls the archive “the law of what can be said, the system which governs the appearance of statements” (1972, 129). The ancient Greek archive was private, the domain of the arkhē: the first law. Derrida (1996) expands on this in Archive Fever, showing how public access to archives is still mediated by private structures. Hence, “a feeling of getting lost while retracing one’s steps” (Ibid., 72). Like Peck’s photographer, the archive is both record and performance. Latour’s Parliament of Things (2017) argues for negotiation between actors—object and subject—in the knowledge-making process. Derrida’s reading of Freud introduces metaphorical doors: the modalities of archival access. “The three doors of the future to come resemble each other to the point of confusion” (1996, 69). This echoed my own use of tunnels in imagery: the underpassing at Barbican; the bridge Balfron Tower; the hallway Trellick Tower; even the train scene in Giant in the Sun (Samuelson, 1959). These spaces, both public and modernist, carried my story and those of my comrades.

To avoid becoming a sterile spectator is to demand more from both viewer and maker. I struggled to articulate my thoughts. By screening the film to my younger brother’s cohort, I reflected critically. Like Onyeka, I was drawn to dance scenes. “Fundamentally, dance was used in these films to signify what the colonial image considered to be blackness,” says Igwe (2020). But these dances are also acts of resistance, such as during the Aba Women’s Protest. My film began to focus on challenging the colonial image of Blackness. By foregrounding contemporary Black production and framing, I was able to offer a more nuanced representation. My blackness also plays a role here.

Artists have left us with a legacy of political representation. Ben Enwonwu, a UCL alum, is foremost in mind. While known for painting and sculpture, his work on stamp production deserves attention. In Ghana: The Year of the Quiet Sun (1964-65), stamps became political icons. Enwonwu led a similar effort in Nigeria. By crafting a portrait of the Queen, he hexed her figure. I used stamps to represent nationalism's struggles. After independence, ex-colonies faltered. New forms of colonialism emerged through corporate occupation. Philosophy turned against capitalism, and Third World cinema gained traction. Nationalism became synonymous with post-colonial hope. Didi Cheeka cries, “What happened to the promise of SWAPO?” I think of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wole Soyinka (1997), resistance embodied. I uncovered a sense of erasure—redacted wars, censored nationalism. I had to include this in the film.

Festac '77 in Lagos was a cultural reset. A pan-African festival celebrating national pride. The festival’s logo, a native mask, was created after the British Museum refused to return the Benin Bronzes. That replica became its symbol. Statues Also Die (1953), Statues Also Die Once Again (2025), and You Hide Me (1970) continue this archival discourse. Decolonising the Archive hosts ongoing conferences on these themes. Esther Stanford-Xosei speaks powerfully on reparations. My commitment preceded this project, but it solidified through the work. I chose Tac One as the typeface—the same as Festac magazine.

The archive is not a passive vessel of memory, but a contested arena of power, identity, and resistance. Through layered reflection, the absurdity of bureaucratic processes, and deeply personal storytelling, I engaged with the archive as both material and metaphor. The film became a medium to explore selfhood through networks of memory, state, colonial history, and digital infrastructure. From Balfron Tower to the British Museum, from Kafka to Fanon, from dance scenes to digital nodes, this project stitched together the fragmented echoes of a colonial past to form a coherent yet questioning present. Representation is not enough; transformation is required. In pushing through the tunnels of archives, I did not merely revisit the past—I reassembled it, forming a new structure through which identity might emerge.

Works Cited

Adegoke, Oluwatosin, director. Archives Also Die. Goke Studio, 2025.

Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Bodley Head, 2019.

Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land: Cahier D'un Retour Au Pays Natal. Edited by Annie Pritchard, translated by Mireille Rosello and Annie Pritchard, Bloodaxe Books, 2020.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive fever : a Freudian impression. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Elon, Danae, director. Rule of Stone. Danae Elon and Paul Cadieux, 2024.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, Penguin Books, Limited, 2021.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.

Follett, Ken. Die Säulen der Erde. HarperCollins, 1989.

Foucault, Michel. L'archéologie du savoir. Gallimard, 1969.

Haneke, Michael, director. The Castle. Veit Heiduschka, Christina Undritz, 1997.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Modest−Witness@Second−Millennium.FemaleMan−Meets−OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge, 1997.

Hayden, Lucy K. “‘THE MAN DIED’, PRISON NOTES OF WOLE SOYINKA: A RECORDER AND VISIONARY.” CLA Journal, vol. 18, no. 4, 1975, pp. 542-52. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44329184. Accessed 12 6 2025.

Hitchens, Christopher. Hitch-22: A Memoir. Grand Central Publishing, 2011.

Igwe, Onyeka. “being close to, with or amongst.” Feminist Review, vol. 125, no. 1, 2020, pp. 44-53. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778920918152. Accessed 12 6 2025.

Julien, Isaac. Once Again... (Statues Never Die). 2022.

Kafka, Frank. The Trial. Verlag Die Schmiede, 1925.

Kossakovsky, Viktor, director. Architecton. Ma.ja.de., 2024.

Latour, Bruno. On actor-network theory: A few clarifications. Soziale Welt ed., vol. vol. 47, Nomos, 1996. no. 4 vols. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40878163.

Lindqvist, Sven. Exterminate All the Brutes. Translated by Joan Tate, New Press, 1996.

O’Donoghue, Darragh. “Review of Exterminate All the Brutes.” Cinéaste, vol. 47, no. 1, 2021, pp. 44-46. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27087984. Accessed 12 June 2025.

Owoo, Nii Kwate, director. You Hide Me. 1970.

Peck, Raoul, director. Exterminate All the Brutes. Daniel Delume, Sara Rodriguez, 2021.

Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]. Pandora's Box, 2024.

Resnais, Alain, et al., directors. Les statues meurent aussi [Statues Also Die]. Présence Africaine, 1953.

Samuelson, Sydney W. W., director. Giant in the Sun. Nigerian Film Unit, 1959.

Simons, Massimiliano. “The Parliament of Things and the Anthropocene: How to Listen to ‘Quasi-Objects.’” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. 21, no. 2/3, 2017, pp. 150-174. Philosophy Documentation Center, https://doi.org/10.5840/techne201752464. Accessed 12 6 2025.

Toynbee, Polly. “ID cards could work for Britain - and in the fight against reform.” The Guardian [London], no. Journal, 10 June 2025.

Welles, Orson, director. The Trial. Film Finances, 1967.

African film students in the USSR played a significant role in the emergence and development of cinema across Africa and globally. Their influence stems from a historical lineage of self-determination within the African diaspora, alongside a wider global reckoning with war, modernity, and nationhood in the aftermath of the Second World War. The term ‘African’ here primarily refers to francophone West African and sub-Saharan postcolonial auteur cinema, whose practitioners have historically led this transnational cinematic exchange.

Between 1960 and 1991, a minority of African students—among the 43,500 African STEM scholars enrolled in Soviet universities—received scholarships to study in Soviet Russia (Katsakioris 2017, 260).

This essay contextualises their participation in global cinema through three interrelated axes: first, the dominance of Western scientific knowledge practices, including the organisation of matter and geology, and their role in enacting cultural hegemony and racialisation; second, the USSR’s ideological outreach to the Global South during the Cold War, which positioned cinema as a strategic cultural tool within Marxist-Leninist frameworks; and third, how African students navigated, adapted, and eventually extended this cinematic language into unique expressions of Black radical thought.

Grounding this context is a reflection on Western scientific classification and its role in racialising African people, historically resisted by the African diaspora. Yusoff (2018) links geology and colonial violence, contextualising the Anthropocene through the conquest of land and exploitation of mineral resources. She maps the colonial encounter as one of displacement, forced labour, and sexual violence: “This exchange is the directed colonial violence of forced eviction from land, enslavement on plantations, in rubber factories and mines, and the indirect violence of pathogens through forced contact and rape.” (Yusoff 2018, 20). Beginning with the plantation economies of 1452, Africans were rendered into property, commodified and categorised.

Resistance to this propertied relation emerged through alternate cosmologies, such as ‘maroonage’—the fugitive slave’s symbolic reconnection with the earth. This worldview unsettled colonial hierarchies. As Aime Césaire says:

Where are you going my maroon wife my restored one my cimarron it is so alive the stones are freezing and the filings and the pellets tremble their gift of sabotage in the waters and the seasons. (Césaire 1946)

Western subjugation is the dominant scientific knowledge practice that saw enslaved natives as scientifically inferior. This is a logical consequence of the categorisation and organisation of matter. In Black Metamorphosis, Sylvia Wynter demonstrates ‘how once European intellectuals "proved" Black (and Native) cultural inferiority, economic exploitation of Black labor on the encomiendas and plantations of the New World easily and logically followed’ (White 2010, 135). She highlights examples of black resistance throughout the 1700s such as Junkororo, the ring shout and Syncretic Black Christianity. These groups of resistance all worked to push back against the categorisation of matter imposed by the dominant hegemony of Christianity. Through these examples, we have introduced the dynamics of categorisation rooted in colonial subjugation. We have also acknowledged the beginnings of the rejection of this subjugation by the African people throughout this process.

This resistance persisted into the 1800s, when technological revolutions—like Watt’s steam engine—shifted systems of knowledge once again. Fossil-fuel-based industrial expansion brought new ecological consequences, reshaping categories like capital, labour, and atmosphere. C.L.R. James, in The Black Jacobins (1938), demonstrates how Haiti’s slave economy financed European revolutions, especially France’s. Toussaint Louverture’s leadership subverted European assumptions of Black political capacity, showing how technology, labour, and categorisation remained contested sites.

Arnold Toynbee, reflecting on postwar sovereignty, observed the unsustainability of fragmented global politics in an age of devastating weaponry, saying:

I believe that with such weapons as we have now let loose in the world, the world cannot go on very long in the condition in which politics have been in the West since the fall of the Roman Empire, a condition in which a great many local sovereign states are each going their own way and occasionally colliding with each other and fighting each other. (Toynbee 1987, 29).

The atomic bomb, a turning point in human and planetary history, forced a rethinking of human agency and responsibility, ushering in the Anthropocene. The USSR’s educational outreach to African colonies formed part of this global reckoning. After Stalin’s death, the Soviets intensified their ideological alignment with decolonising nations, endorsing events like the 1955 Bandung Conference. By 1961, the Patrice Lumumba University embodied Soviet solidarity with the Third World, aiming to produce pro-Soviet intelligentsia (Katsakioris 2017, 260). Indeed, there were other host countries for African students, but Russia quickly became a major player on the leaderboard.

The interest went both ways, as fascination with “ideology, the international policies, and the technological achievements of the USSR” was widespread among African youth (Ibid., 263). In his broad survey of African students in France, the Senegalese ethnographer Jean-Pierre N’Daya found that 25% admired the USSR, 20% China, 12.4% Israel, 12% Cuba, 8% France, and 3.3% the USA (Ibid., 263). This data reveals that many African students developed a strong connection to Soviet ideology—and more broadly, Communism—with Mao’s China also attracting significant admiration. They sought education not as passive recipients, but as active agents who believed it would enable their countries’ economic development and modernisation, much like the European revolutions.

In Russia, debates about the role of cinema and its ability to spread ideology started to flourish. Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) offered new ways of thinking. A Filmmaker, trained as an Engineer and Architect, now ‘regard[ed] cinema as a factor for exercising emotional influence over the masses’ (Eisenstein 1974, 74), popularising the montage of attraction as a more appropriate method of cinema to traditional linearity in continuity editing. With this opposition to a seamless flow of images, he started to question the authorship of the filmmaker, and instead to favour the self-determination of the spectator. Cinema could be understood to manufacture emotion using attraction which is ‘any demonstrable fact that is known and proven to exercise a definite effect on the attention and emotions of the audience and that combined with others possess the characteristics of concentrating the audience’s emotions in any direction dictated by the production’s purpose’ (Beller 2006, 96).

African Film students followed in the footsteps of Eisenstein, using their works to explore stories of revolt, political unrest, and encouraging active participation from viewers. In Bamako (2006) by Abderrahmane Sissako, a village is turned into a theatrical stage for the court proceedings against the World Bank. The community self-organise in pursuit of justice. There are key differences to Russian cinema worth considering here, where communist ideology is maintained throughout soviet works, foreign films remain indiscriminate, critiquing all sides. In Ceddo (1977), Sembene highlights the power struggle between African natives, Islam, and Christendom in a small village. By reflecting on the colonial impact, these works go beyond Eisenstein. Creating an alternative worldview that stood in contrast to the dominant competing hegemonies. In Waiting for Happiness (2002), Sissako balances the pros and cons of globalisation by looking at a small village in Mali. We lose touch with the native land, as the protagonist struggles to speak his old tongue.

Returning to Russian cinema for a moment as they continued to alter cinematic language. In 1929, Dziga Vertov released Man with Movie Camera - a film that focused on the workers around Moscow and unapologetically revealed the techniques traditionally hidden in film production. Vertov was a filmmaker and theorist who fundamentally opposed feature films and instead pushed for realism in cinema. “Man with Movie Camera expresses the material relations with a camera that is ‘an eye in matter,’ and that matter is in circulation” (Ibid., 54). Highlighting the importance of exploiting cinematic techniques like editing. His work also cherished real people working collectively. This changed the cinematic landscape globally, demanding ethnologic realism, influencing Italian Neorealism, French New Wave, and Third World Cinema, leading to contributions from filmmakers like Jean Rouch further blurring the lines between the observer and the observed. Though silent, Vertov’s cinema influenced African students who prioritised sound and music not as exotic elements, but as fundamental tools of storytelling. In contrast, African cinema used music to draw viewers into unfamiliar rituals, turning sonic rhythm into cinematic language. More on this later.

Indeed, African Film students in the USSR were well aware of these movements in Russian cinema. They screened the above alongside films like An African Tale (1963) by Igor Nikolayev and Leoni Ariso. This animation aligned with Marxist alienated labour, turning man into an animal. It showed the animal kingdom oppressing an African protagonist. Filmmakers like Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène; the Malian filmmakers Souleymane Cissé; Ethiopian filmmaker Michel Papatakis; and Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako would learn about these films and go on to launch Film industries in their home countries. They held veneration for their education. Souleymane Cissé reports “this love which [Boris Izrailovich Volchek] gave him during these years of study” (Chomentowski 2019, 193).

For reasons distracting from the point of this essay, Universities in Russia enrolled a majority of STEM-based students from Africa. Art and Humanities-based students were the minority. Because of this, the Art community remained tight and stable. Future intelligentsia enrolled or visited Soviet Russia, like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, the American poet Langston Hughes, and the pan-African civil rights activist WEB Du Bois. This continued to fuel the flames of freedom, creating a new language for African colonies to engage with their self-determination. Black Radicalism started to spread and variants like Negritude, African Socialism, African Anarchism, and Pan-Afrikanism created a new way to resist Western categorisation of matter. This was celebrated in pan-Afrikan arts festivals like Festac in Nigeria or the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts.

Returning to this new language and the importance of music, Yeelen (1987) and Moolade (2006) by Soulayman Cissé and Ousmane Sembène, respectively, go beyond Vertov’s visual rhythm and use music as a tool to draw the viewer in, similar to how a zoom might focus on an object. In the opening scene of Yeelen, ritual, magic, and sound convey indigenous Malian cosmology - powers of the Kore people. In this scene, music sets the tone, and similar to Eisenstein, is used to manufacture the emotions of the spectator. Moolade, which deals with the longstanding tradition of female genital mutilation in Senegal, uses music in the same way. When Collé sets the protective force of the Moolade to shelter a group of girls from the evil of genital mutilation, music becomes the form through which our attention is commanded. Given the cultural proximity of home viewers to these movies, the alignment of culture to what is signified would not require music as a crutch, but for non-native viewers, this is not the case. In Ceddo (1977), Sembène decides to work exclusively with Manu Dibango to create an immersive soundtrack, underscoring his narrative tempo. Through this, we have acknowledged the role of music found in Third-World cinema, and its extensions on language found in Russian cinema.

Women further extend this cinematic language. In Bamako (2006), women repeatedly represent the voice of dissidence, airing out genuine problems that concern the village in once French Sudan, now Mali. Today, it is a city with millions seeking refuge, with overcrowding and strain on infrastructure describing a handful of their list of problems (See Laure Panerai 2019).

Sambizanga (1972) by Sarah Maldoror was the first feature film directed by a Black woman and centres a Black female protagonist. Set in 1970 Angola, Maria’s search for her husband exposes the intersections of gender, class, and anticolonial struggle in the country. Sarah presents a story of self-determination from the perspective of untold identities, highlighting the intersections present in Angola after Portuguese rule. In Sembène’s Xala (1975), an African Socialist is unable to consummate his celebratory marriage because of a native curse: Xala. He uses women in this film to symbolise attributes of self-determination. In particular, Rama the daughter of the protagonist, is seen wearing the traditional Wolof cloth, under the map of Africa, defiantly speaking the native Wolof tongue. Symbolism runs wild in her character. More interestingly though, Sembène is fearless in shining the light African nationalists, christianity, and islam. Judging African Socialism in an equal light to Colonial Europe. In this way, it is important to note that this cinematic language was not tied to governmental regimes, per se, unlike Soviet cinema.

These filmmakers understood their role as political agents. While trained in Moscow, they did not replicate Soviet propaganda but challenged both colonial and postcolonial regimes. Their critique was equal-opportunity—targeting imperialism, African socialism, and foreign ideologies alike.

Maldoror’s legacy inspired future directors like Safi Faye, whose work Mossane (1996) extends this practice by challenging the ethnographic gaze cast on Africa. Through her fictional story, presented as a legend – which stays true to native folkloric tradition - the protagonist, Mossane, possesses enough beauty to cause village conflict. In this way, the male gaze is called into question, casting a dual perspective on the sacred and sacrificial properties of beauty. Safi Faye, like Eisenstein debates freedom, but her questions focus on the perspective of women, subverting traditionally male-dominated concepts, “pushing [critics] to consider her work as cinema sensu stricto , i.e., the seventh art, in which imagination defies actuality, and where the link between the virtual and the real is not a question of mimesis - the reproduction of reality - but a disclosure of reality” (M. De Groof. 428). The evolution of Safi Faye is worth noting here too, training in ethnology to being cast by Jean Rouch after meeting at Dakar Festival of Negro Arts. Her position as an ethnographer turned actor turned filmmaker, positions her in opposition to the gaze of western exoticism.

African filmmakers have always aimed to represent mythology and legend. Safi Faye as an ethnologist recognised the importance of oral history through her research. “It is from the verbal expression of the storyteller that images create and re-create the imagination. Hence, African legends are wholly visualized in the mind of the spectator who partakes in the storytelling.” (Ellerson 251) Acknowledging, we can better understand how Faye’s work, similar to Sembene, aims to show how tradition and modernity confront African reality. Yandé Codou Sène: the griot voice of history narrates Mossane’s trials and tribulations, existing as an oracle guiding the spectator along this critical reflection. The west African storyteller or poet is called griot. Yandé Codou Sène was the griot of Leopold Sedar Senghor - president of Senegal and founder of Dakar Festival of Negro Arts. These filmmakers understood that politics was woven into the fabrics of their stories and moments about African history could be imagined to stimulate discussions on tensions between modernity and tradition.

This political aesthetic hinged on time. Modernity afterall was propertied by a shrinking in spacetime, as transportation opened up the global landscape, and digital networks, like emails travelled across great distances. In Waiting for Happiness (2002), Sissako captures villagers in limbo, awaiting departure for the West. The disrupted temporal flow mirrors geopolitical dependence. Time also animates Sembène’s Black Girl (1966), where past and present collide in a story of migration and alienation. In this way, African cinema appropriated the Deleuzian time-image—not simply to affect, but to archive, provoke, and radicalise. Through cinematic time, these filmmakers chronicled the uneven temporality of postcolonial life, forging a new language of self-determination and spectral resistance. By breaking the linearity of time found in classical cinema, these filmmakers were able to engage with Nationhood.

Indeed, this new language was not limited to sub-Saharan and West Africa. Throughout the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, filmmakers began to implement new understandings. A notable mention here is another filmmaker taught in Moscow, Kidlat Tahimik. His work Perfumed Nightmares (1977), provided reflections on the remnants of war left in the Philippines post-Japanese occupation. We bear witness to the metamorphised ‘vehicles of war’ to ‘vehicles of work’. He takes a film-essay approach to reflect on war and nationhood, giving the viewer a window into life in the Philippines after American occupation. In this way, the significance of this educational revolution should not be isolated to sub-Saharan Africa, it does connect to a wider shifts in cinema more globally.

In Deleuze’s theory of cinema, the end of the Great Wars created a shift away from the Movement-Image – a continuity-based series of images to create linearity in movement; to a Time-Image – a direct image of time through aesthetics and/or characters that engage with time through the plot. In this way, montage has changed its meaning, it takes on a new function: instead of being concerned with Movement-Images from which it extracts an indirect image of time, it is concerned with the Time-Image, and extracts from it the relations of time on which aberrant movement must now depend. In this way, cinema shifted to incite change and movement, it can encourage self-determination and ignite flames of action. Because of this, cinema was uprooted as an aesthetic art form, and revered for its ability to reflect consciousness on itself insofar as the viewer has an emotion manufactured by the plot of a film that accurately signifies cultural symbols that lead to some action regarding their past, current, or future existence.

Their cinematic language challenges us to rethink how moving images document time and memory. Whether through non-linear narratives, traditional music, or visual symbolism, African filmmakers question the notion of modernity as singular or Western, challenging education and monolithic production of knowledge. They assert, instead, multiple modernities—ones shaped by indigenous cosmologies, colonial rupture, and diasporic return. Faye places education as a tool for independence. Mossane’s fate being sealed by her forced early retirement from the system, her parents requiring a translator to read her suitor’s proposal letter. Or the student in Waiting for Happiness who slowly forgets his native tongue, preferring to speak french instead. These reconceptualisations offer rich material for film theory, especially as it intersects with postcolonial, feminist, and ecological critique.

We might consider their films as archival projects—repositories of affect, memory, and resistance. Where Soviet cinema instrumentalised montage for ideological synthesis, African cinema mobilised it for fragmentation and ambiguity, opening interpretive spaces that reject closure. Their soundtracks, too, resonate beyond entertainment, functioning as sonic geographies that map belonging and loss. The griot’s voice, the call to prayer, or the sound of water evoke layered histories, situating the viewer within a decolonial sensorium.

This legacy also demands a reconsideration of pedagogical models. African cinema’s emergence from Soviet tutelage illustrates how education is never neutral; it is a battleground of epistemologies. In foregrounding African perspectives, these filmmakers rejected Eurocentric hierarchies of knowledge, choosing instead to valorise embodied wisdom, oral tradition, and community storytelling. The classroom was thus extended into the village square, the marketplace, the protest site—spaces where politics unfold as performance.

To engage seriously with African film is to acknowledge its ongoing role in shaping geopolitical discourse. Recent films like Dahomey (2024), and historic ones like Touki Bouki (1973), and Black Girl (1966) continue to ask what it means to remember, to belong, and to resist. Their auteurs—Mati Diop, Djibril Diop Mambéty, and Sembène—bridge generations, drawing from the foundations laid in Moscow, Dakar, Bamako, and beyond.

In sum, the legacy of African film students in the USSR is one of radical hybridity. By metabolising Soviet cinematic theory into a distinctly African form, they expanded the possibilities of what film can do—and whom it can speak for. Their work remains a testament to the power of image and sound to transform not only how we see the world, but how we imagine its future. And as newer African auteurs continue to emerge, their films draw on this legacy while embracing a wider archive—including digital aesthetics, climate collapse, and Afro-futurist imagination. From Bamako to Dahomey to Moscow, cinema becomes a moving archive of African futurity, rich with ancestral voices and revolutionary dreams.

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Works Cited

Beller, Jonathan. The cinematic mode of production : attention economy and the society of the spectacle. Dartmouth College Press, 2006.

Cesaire, Aimé. The Collected Poetry. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette J. Smith, University of California Press, 1983.

Chomentowski, Gabrielle. “Filmmakers from Africa and the Middle East at VGIK during the Cold War.” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, vol. 13, no. 2, 2019, pp. 189-198. https://doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2019.1590914.

Cissé, Souleymane, director. Yeelen. Souleymane Cissé, 1987.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “Montage of Attractions: For "Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman."” The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 18, 1974, pp. 77-85.

Eisenstein, Sergei, director. Strike. 1st Goskino Factory, 1925.

Katsakioris, Constantin. “Creating a Socialist Intelligentsia.” Soviet Educational Aid and its Impact on Africa (1960-1991), 2017, Pages 259 to 288. Open Edition Journal, https://shs.cairn.info/journal-cahiers-d-etudes-africaines-2017-2-page-259?lang=en.

Maldoror, Sarah, director. Sambizanga. Isabelle Films, 1972.

Sembène, Ousmane, director. Black Girl. André Zwoboda, 1966.

Sembène, Ousmane, director. Ceddo. Film Doomi Reew, 1977.

Sembène, Ousmane, director. Xala. Filmi Domireve SNC, 1975.

Sissako, Abderrahmane, director. Bamako. Archipel 33, 1925.

Sissako, Abderrahmane, director. Waiting for Happiness. Maji-da Abdi; Nicolas Royer, 2002.

Tahimik, Kidlat, director. Perfumed Nightmare. Kidlat Tahimik, 1977.

Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History: Volume I: Abridgement of Volumes I-vi: 1-vi. Oxford University Press, 1987. VI vols.

White, Derrick. “Black Metamorphosis: A Prelude to Sylvia Wynter's Theory of the Human.” The CLR James Journal, vol. 16, no. 1, 2010, p. 22.

Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes Or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Faye, Safi. Mossane. 1996

Diop, Mati. Dahomey. Diop,Mati. Robin, Eve. Lou Lévy, Judith. 2024.

Ellerson, Beti. “African Women in Cinema Dossier: Safi Faye’s Mossane: A Song to Women to Beauty, to Africa” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 10, no 2 (Spring 2019). 250-265, doi:10.2979/blackcamera.10.2.18

James, C. L. R. (1938). The Black Jacobins (1st ed.). Penguin History

Ryan Coogler’s latest contribution to the Hollywood blockbuster canon is a chilling triumph—haunted by history and infused with imaginative moonshine. Rooted in the methodology of critical fabulation, Sinners tells the story of the blues, the 20th-century Great Migration, and the rise of street crime in Prohibition-era Chicago and Mississippi. With this film, Coogler, an accomplished director and frequent collaborator of Michael B. Jordan, extends his signature filmography, satisfying cinephiles invested in the cultural and industrial development of America.

History has been a cornerstone of Coogler’s storytelling. In Fruitvale Station (2013), Oscar Grant is rendered immortal. In Sinners (2025), the blues, Coogler’s own grandfather, and Black identity itself are eternalised. For the technically inclined, the director also stirs excitement around the ‘5 to 15 perf’ perforated celluloid. He doesn’t just direct; he delivers cinema as artifact. In doing so, Coogler deepens the director-spectator relationship, challenging viewers to choose a vice. I booked my IMAX tickets early, an indulgence worth every frame.

Stories can stand alone through plot, drawing in the viewer with narrative tension alone. Pulp Fiction (1994) resists genre categorisation—crime, drama, neo-noir—and emerges as something altogether its own. Being John Malkovich (1999), while comedic at times, veers into the fantastic. Sinners, however, is firmly planted in the horror tradition, summoning America’s most persistent monster through the wail of war-torn blues.

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Horror has long offered a space of reclamation for marginalised communities. In the 1950s, the genre saw a commercial decline as Hollywood shifted away from its classical models. At the same time, Black actors struggled to escape roles built on stereotypes—think Butterfly McQueen, who left the industry altogether in protest. Horror offered a rare opening. Films like Blacula (1972), Blackenstein (1973), and Ganja & Hess (1973) carved out a space for Black expression. These films subverted positivist ideologies, undermining scientific and social myths about race. The monster—long a projection of white anxiety—was reclaimed, transformed, and redefined. Enter: Blaxploitation.

Sinners advances this tradition through a more nuanced engagement with ancestral memory. Parallels to Ganja & Hess, my favorite of the genre, are striking. In that film, Dr. Hess Green is stabbed by a Myrthian dagger, binding him to a lineage of ancient blood drinkers. In Sinners, we meet Stack, a Mississippi gangster turned vampire after a bite from his mysterious mistress. Her racial ambiguity baffles the characters; only the most perceptive among them catch on. She grew up with Stack’s family, her street smarts intact. Her proximity to whiteness—a life among the whites of Mississippi—serves as a disguise, a survival heist. As characters ask her, “What are you?” the audience is invited to reflect on her position within the margins.

Where Ganja & Hess fragments time, creating a meditative, personal journey, Sinners is grounded in collective memory. In one standout jukebox scene, the viewer ascends into a sonic realm of ancestral drums, pygmy chants, and unapologetic tribal rhythms. The scene isn’t essential to the plot, and that’s the point—it transcends it. Horror permits such departures, allowing the fantastical to validate the spiritual. Coogler uses this moment to invite viewers into a deep historical and cultural archive, one saturated with Afro-Asian roots and diasporic resonance. He lures us in with the pleasures of Hollywood, then gently redirects our attention.

Michael B. Jordan delivers a powerhouse performance in dual roles, exploring contrasting modes of Black masculinity. As Smoke, physical might is paired with communal tenderness. As Stack, a killer’s instinct is offset by the quiet grief of fatherhood. Smoke’s scenes with Preacher Boy—their cousin, a guitarist and son of a preacher—evoke warmth and play. Stack, meanwhile, carries the weight of loss, forming the emotional base for the film’s female leads. Annie, played by Wunmi Mosaku, balances his intensity with oracular calm, her whispered prayers working as distant protective spells.

Magic holds authority in this world. The film stretches from the trauma of the Irish famine to the Transatlantic slave trade, tracing lines of descent through vampires and market women. Voodoo and Third World witchcraft anchor the story. The moment Mary is exposed, the rules of science dissolve, and mystical knowledge takes the helm. Here, music becomes the conduit. We are asked not just to listen, but to remember.

In the real world, racial oppression throttled the blues’ development. Black musicians faced constant danger; creativity came at a cost. This violence stifled not just music, but the very production of musical knowledge. Sinners transcends that history by shifting into the realm of the magical. In this world, the KKK is irrelevant—forgotten. Even mobsters supercede their position. In the film’s final scenes, we are reminded that tenderness—particularly fatherhood—is power.

As Saidiya Hartman argues through her theory of critical fabulation, historical research can be paired with speculative imagination to address the gaps and silences in the archive—especially those concerning the enslaved and marginalised. Coogler embraces this practice, offering a vision of the lost bluesman resurrected through magic, community, and story. Music, here, is not just sound. It’s survival. It’s memory. It’s myth reborn.

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