Watchlist by Woonhuis, Screening 1

the walls have mouths Onyeka Igwe 5’02”

West Indies Med Hondo 110”

Med Hondo uses the meaning of an indoor stage to recast centuries of history and relations between the french west indies and the french ‘main land’. West Indies collapses histories and geographies into the same stage set. Here, the psychological relation between the West Indians as they consider France and the promise and suspicions it holds in regards to its recurring extractive and exploitative politics is examined.

Following this, we will look at a somehow different stage.

the walls have mouths by artist Onyeka Igwe was filmed during a visit to the Former Empire and Commonwealth Collection Archive in Bristol. Igwe was employed to sift through decaying film canisters in order to digitise them. From a stifling basement of this so-called archive, her and her colleague enter a wide open and empty top floor. Here she is not touching mouldy film strips nor viewing violent colonial images, rather she is free to articulate her own movements, reminiscent of dancing among friends. the walls have mouths is a work that draws attention to how a building erected to serve a colonial system can itself speak. It is designed to encapsulate the purpose of an archive to colonialists – to perpetuate violence and exploitation.  In the remains of what was once the stage of constructed and reductive images, a body is introduced, a embodied perspective:

“I know that in those moments I felt light, or lightened.

There is a moment that stains the memory of the experience –  I outstretch my arms, incrementally, to a wingspan that it is odd to see myself possess and I drink in this width like a large exhale, finding space in depth that I didn’t know was there.

After, I had to catch my breath and in exhilarated acknowledgement we descended the stairs and back to the archive. “