Filipa César
In collaboration with the Gulbenkian Foundation Delegation in France , KADIST welcomes Filipa César , AFIELD fellow, for a residency from October 22 to November 7, 2022. The residency is tailor-made for each invited personality and is conceived as an opportunity to showcase their work and commitment to the largest possible audience. For this first edition, the filmmaker Filipa César and her collaborator Marinho de Pina are invited to share their cinematographic work and their commitment, through the project Mediateca Onshore . This place of art and culture, co-founded with the filmmaker Sana na N’Hada in the village of Malafo in Guinea-Bissau and just inaugurated (September 2022), proposes a media library of audiovisual, cinematographic and digital production, a web edition, a residency, and highlights the relationships of humans to their environment. This residency is accompanied by a program of public events and a masterclass. Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in the porous relationship between the moving image and its reception by the public, the fictional aspects of documentary, and the politics and poetics inherent in the production of moving images. A large part of her films focus on the spectres of resistance within the geopolitical history of Portugal. Through the creation of performative spaces, she proposes a subjective approach to knowledge and questions the mechanisms of production of the great national narratives as well as the erasure of events and gestures of minorities. Since 2011, she has made several films that take as their matrix the first hours of the cinema of struggle and liberation in Guinea-Bissau, like fragments of a lost heritage whose potential she seeks to reanimate through a collective research, Luta ca caba inda (The struggle is not yet over). In 2017, Spell Reel, her first feature film that traces this adventure, had its world premiere at the Berlinale (Forum) and then showed in festivals and museums around the world, where it received numerous awards. With Sunstone (2018), which she directed in collaboration with Louis Henderson, she returns to the vein of a cinema that questions the visual technologies of power and the materiality of the gaze, in the spirit of the works of Harun Farocki. César has also shown her work regularly in contemporary art venues such as SAAVY (Berlin), Khiasma (Paris), Tensta konsthall, e-flux, Mumok,MoMA, Harvard Museum of Cinema. She was granted the AFIELD fellowship for art and social engagement in support of the project Mediateca Onshore. AFIELD is an international network of cultural changemakers grown from fellowships given to artists and cultural practitioners who have initiated social projects catalyzing change and empowering their communities in long-term and tangible ways. Marinho Pina is currently pursuing a PhD at the University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL), focusing on city planning in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau. He researches Guinea-Bissauan architecture and has a master’s degree in vernacular architecture and clay building. He is also a performing artist and a writer. Since 2016 he has been working in the public management of AJASS, a social organization in Sonaco, which aims to improve the quality of local education, to fight against female genital mutilation and HIV/AIDS, and against ecological destruction such as deforestation. Marinho de Pina is part of the collective developing the space Abotcha – Mediateca Onshore in Guinea Bissau, and has been collaborating in the New Alphabet research project at HKW, Berlin.