Resonance Spiral

The Mediateca Onshore in Malafo, a village in Guinea-Bissau, is an archive and a club for agropoetic practices. As Amílcar Cabral talks feminism on tape, the directors speak in the mangroves about the contradictions of depicting the community.

Observing and listening, filmmaker and artist Filipa César and author and architect Marinho de Pina discuss the possible futures for a place that they helped to found: an itinerant project launched in 2017 then settled into fixed premises in 2022, the Mediateca Onshore is a collaborative venture co-managed with the inhabitants of Malafo village, near the birthplace of activist filmmaker Sana na N’Hada, as well as local associations of women, parents and farmers. Sharing knowledge and practices, safeguarding memory and inciting discussion: if the film repeatedly returns to the motif of the circle, inside which film archives appear and which is shaped by the captions displayed on the image, the idea is not to close the circle but rather create circulation (the letters in fact make a revolution)—for the place and the film alike, what counts above all is to create a passage between an epoch of militant effervescence and the open opportunities of the present. How can it be ensured that power passes from hand to hand? Well aware of the situated nature of their viewpoint, the filmmakers question themselves during a conversation in the mangrove. Offloading their verticality, they integrate the landscape as if allowing it to see them. A Portuguese national, Filipa César carries within her a little of the colonial power. How can we avoid being paralysed by contradictions, mired in the limits of what we are? A utopia inevitably encircled by doubt, the film portrays an anchorage from which new energies can be unleashed.

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian