Liquid Ruin: Aquatic Sonic Infidelity in Akosua Adoma Owusu’s Drexciya (2010)
Undergraduate Journal for Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto
This academic journal article involves Akosua Adoma Owusu’s "Drexciya" (2010) and discusses the short film's emphasis on ruin, lack, and mythologized space which extends the filmmaker’s futurist work into the realm of the pessimistic. Drexciya is a short experimental documentary that captures a concrete, abandoned Olympic-sized swimming pool in Accra, Ghana. This article engages with discussions of modern architecture, spatial realities in cinema, and aesthetic realizations of Afro-pessimism and Afro-futurism to situate Owusu’s ruins and liquidity.
Transmediality at High/Low Culture Cross-Roads: High Fashion and Low-fi Video in the Work of Thebe Magugu
This is the text for a conference paper given at the Cinema Studies Graduate Student Union Conference in 2023 entitled "Bad Objects." The conference paper examines the transmediality of Thebe Magugu's recent designer clothing collections and the photography and video that accompany these collections. In particular, this paper looks at "Discard Theory" a documentary directed by Francesco "Franadilla" Mbele for Magugu's SS23 collection and "BANYOLOYI A BOSIGO" directed by Kristin Lee Moolman for Magugu's AW21 collection.
“Don’t Try This at Home” Fragmented Collectivity in DIY Rude-Boy Media
This is the text for a conference paper given at the Cinema Studies Graduate Student Union Conference in 2024 entitled "Fragmentation." This conference paper seeks to explore fragmentation as an analytic approach to collectivity onscreen and beyond the screen through performance, spectatorship and video and digital moving image aesthetics. Across three distinct media objects - skateboarding videos, streetball mixtapes and stunt videos - this conference paper will focus on the following in connection with fragmentation: the style of the videos, notably the handheld cinematography, digital aesthetic and short segment or compilation form that they share; the visualized representation and effect of the crowd both onscreen and off in the formation of subcultures and a governable gathering of subjects; the corresponding nature of identification between the viewer and the virtual crowd that they are a fragmented part of.
Making En-masse: Collectivity and Resilience in Contemporary African Film Collectives
There is a current wave of filmmakers and collaborators across the African cinema landscape who engage in of intentional collaboration, pedagogical methods of filmmaking, and a commitment to the grassroots growth of local film industries. Collectives form to address this collectivity directly and use it as a strategy for experimenting with form, responding to contextual constraints in production and forging new networks between filmmakers and with audiences. African film collectives demonstrate the impact of intentional and fluid collectivity on the filmmaking process, the film as a product and the local cinema landscapes.
On Collectivity
A conversation with Ajabu Ajabu traces a glowing patchwork of celluloid and pixels; illuminating the contours of their practice as it flickers across different screenings, collaborative projects, physical spaces and improvisations with the language of film itself. At the heart of this shape-shifting approach is the experience of cinema as a form of collective identity, one that is always ripe to be infused with new meanings and audiences across the African continent and beyond.
Floodlines: Temporal Markers of Exile in Still Life (2006) and This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019)
This is a conference paper that performs a cross comparative analysis of Still Life (2006, dir. Jia Zhangke) and This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (2019, dir. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese) regarding topics of diaspora, exile, and water aesthetics. The films Still Life and This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection stand on opposite sides of a intentional flood: the first, a man returning to find his wife in a neighbourhood now uninhabitable under water; the second, a woman refusing to leave her buried family after an impending flood will force her community out of their ancestral home. Both signal a continuous flow of people through physical and cinematic space, tracing the forced removals and bodies through a neighbourhood soon to be or already unreachable. Both films contain signs of the flood: lingering after its advent for the former; and foreboadingly encroaching in the land before disaster for the latter. They are physical, in the form of caution tape and painted height markers, but they are also social, in the form of bureaucratic presence and the procession of community. The flood’s signs are temporal, demarcating space and indicating impending engulfment, change, and loss.