Six Films, from Rwanda and Beyond: Week 2
Artist Cinemas is pleased to present an online screening of Rahima Gambo’s A Walk (2018), the second installment of École du soir, on view from Wednesday, May 6 through Tuesday, May 12, and featuring an interview with the filmmaker by Ogemdi Ude.
École du soir is a six-part program of films, video works, and interviews from Rwanda and beyond put together by Christian Nyampeta. It is the first program in Artist Cinemas, a long-term, online series of film programs curated by artists for e-flux Video & Film.
Artist Cinemas presents École du soir: Six Films, from Rwanda and Beyond
Week 2: May 6–12, 2020
Rahima Gambo, A Walk, 2018
13:47 minutes
A Walk is a psychogeographical survey from Lagos and Abuja, conceived as an interior cartography mapped onto the external environment traversed by the artist Rahima Gambo. Rahima uses A Walk as a narrative, mobile, and open-ended mechanism that has no beginning, middle, or end, that yields stills, moving images, and an assemblage of found objects sculpted together from objects picked up on her “path.”
Excerpt from the interview with the filmmaker by Ogemdi Ude
Ogemdi Ude:
The way you speak of stepping into yourself by approaching walking—as a deep engagement with your body that comes from slowing down, and trying to capture the world around you while undertaking what feels like a distinctly different activity—evokes that you might be trying to pause some of the images we see in A Walk. Even when the camera shakes, when the tree is waving in the wind, it appears as though you are searching for a way to hold that image still. Yet, A Walk does not really have an moment of actual stillness. Could you speak more to that element of stopping while still moving?
Rahima Gambo:
Indeed, in this stillness, things don’t quite stop. Nothing actually pauses. It’s rather that the awareness of things become heightened. You feel things more. I think that’s what stillness is, because it’s really quite uncomfortable to hold a frame. Photography is all about “capturing” and pulling things in. In contrast, I found a richness to the moving image that is alive, and challenges the very idea of a still image. Photography, and images themselves, have a long history of violence, rooted in the fact that an image cannot speak back to you. Instead, I found an agency or escape door in the moving image. A Walk is not quite video, it’s moving image. It’s not film, it’s moving image. I like this idea of holding the frame and yet, things move in that frame. It’s a slowing down of time.
Watch the film and read the full interview here.
About the program
Presented a week each, the six films in École du soir are not direct points of comparison to the current crisis but reflection devices that draw from localized specificities and historical events, in order to make a linking with the pandemic. The sense of isolation, alienation, and despair felt today finds echoes in these films, as their makers navigate the afterlives of the crises that still shape their present. Effectively, although the geographic and economic scales of the current pandemic are unprecedented, the films bring home the fact that some members of the societies in which the films are located feel or have felt as though their existence is a form of quarantine, characterized long before this moment by trans-generational trauma, the disappearance of habitable environments, exile, and even genocidal brutalities that take away the ability to mourn. Each film is accompanied by a newly commissioned dialog that loosely relates the film to the ongoing pandemic.
École du soir is convened by Christina Nyampeta.
About the series
Artist Cinemas is a new e-flux platform focusing on exploring the moving image as understood by people who make film. It is informed by the vulnerability and enchantment of the artistic process—producing non-linear forms of knowledge and expertise that exist outside of academic or institutional frameworks. It will also acknowledge the circles of friendship and mutual inspiration that bind the artistic community. Over time this platform will trace new contours and produce different understandings of the moving image.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.