Events

GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW | Part 5 | Thulani Rachia

Part of Artists’ Moving Image Festival

23 September 2021
7.30–9pm

Tramway
25 Albert Dr, Glasgow G41 2PE
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Design by Maeve Redmond

Important update: Due to high winds and forecasted wet weather, this event will now take place in T1 at Tramway.

We are delighted to announce the fifth instalment of GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW, this year’s Artists’ Moving Image Festival, which has been co-programmed by artists and writers Tako Taal and Adam Benmakhlouf.

For this iteration of sugar and Bones, developed and adapted by Thulani Rachia as a single channel piece, Rachia uses Langston Hughes’ A Dream Deferred to reflect on a changing urban landscape as a method of remembering.

Originally presented as a duo of works, Ukhumbula Khuphi (Where Do You Remember?) and Ukhumbula Kanjani (How Do You Remember?) at Civic Room, Glasgow, which patiently tracks the changes in Glasgow’s cityscape. Textual interjections were made throughout, coming from African (Nguni) dream theory, which recognises dreaming as central to an individual and a community’s wellbeing and positions dreams and the body as a site of ancestral knowledge.”

Rachia films outside a construction site, showing the stages of deconstruction as an instance of the city’s colonial architecture is unceremoniously torn down to make way for a four-star boutique hotel. Rachia’s filmic response tracks the choreography of the crane, as it becomes a stiff and careful arm, methodically pulverising the building’s remains.

In this new edit of the work for The Hidden Gardens, Rachia draws a line of connection between the deconstruction of the Glasgow cityscape and the breakdown and decay of Harlem’s built environment in the 1950s. In each case, the buildings share their origins in the lost lives, freedom, dreams and hopes of enslaved and colonised people. So it is there’s the double injustice of wrongs that are first painfully endured, then – in a subtly brutal twist – erased from the record unacknowledged. Recognising the particularities of this moment here in Glasgow, the film poignantly draws attention to the insidious consequences of beautification and gentrification. Namely, the demolition of the once grand architecture funded by the profits of violent exploitation bolsters the endemic denial of the central role of Scottish culture and people in colonial rule.

Programme

Work details: 22 min, HD video, silent

In person indoor screening event: Doors open 7:30pm, introductions 7.45pm, screening 8pm, Thursday, 23 September

Work available online: 24 September – 1 October here.

Read Adam Benmakhlouf’s introduction to of sugar and Bones here.

Image: Thulani Rachia, of sugar and Bones, 2019 – 21. Courtesy of the artist.

The festival will continue with a series of screenings and events scheduled to follow the lunar calendar across the rest of 2021. The programme lies in between the folds of artists’ moving image, performance documentation, protest documentary and animation, considering their strategies for interruption, to undo the formal and psychological trappings of a neo-colonial, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal cinema system.

Access

The film will be screened indoors in T1, Tramway’s large theatre space on the ground floor. Please wear face coverings (if you are able to do so) and observe social distancing. Audiences will be asked to check in using a QR code at the door.

The film is 22 minutes long and silent.

For information on how to get to Tramway, please see information on their website: https://​www​.tramway​.org/​v​i​s​i​t-us/

Seating: a combination of chairs and beanbags will be available. For those who have already booked a chair for the outdoor screening event, these reservations will be honoured and a chair will be reserved for you.

Toilet facilities: There will be access to Tramway’s toilet facilities. There are gender neutral toilets located on the ground floor and mezzanine level, and separate male and female toilets on the upper foyer. An accessible toilet which is suitable for wheelchair users is available on each level.

Read more about Tramway’s accessibility here: https://​www​.tramway​.org/​a​c​cess/

Image descriptions

1. A landscape graphic with protest placard like shapes emblazoned with the words GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW’ in capitalised san serif font. The rectangular shapes splay out across an intense reddish pink background, overlapping one another.

2. A video still showing a building demolition in progress. An orange excavator takes up most of the frame, it’s arm, and worn red bucket dominate the foreground. In the background to the right a two-story red brick building is in a state of demolition, it’s rooms are open to the air. To the left another building is covered in scaffolding while a tower block rises in the distance.

GIVE BIRTH TO ME TOMORROW, this year’s Artists’ Moving Image Festival, is supported by Screen Scotland and Film Hub Scotland in partnership with Tramway.

About the artist

Thulani Rachia

Thulani Rachia is an artist and educator based in Glasgow. Having grown up in South Africa, his arts practice contemplates socio-spatial relations constructed by history and the built environment.

Part of Artists’ Moving Image Festival

LUX Scotland and Tramway’s annual Artists’ Moving Image Festival (AMIF)

Learn more