Events
Hadithi Hadithi | Online screening and conversation with Gertrude Malizana and Saoirse Wall
LUX Scotland and Ajabu Ajabu Audio Visual House are delighted to present an online conversation between Gertrude Malizana and Saoirse Wall on Tuesday, 7 June at 6:30pm (GMT). An online screening of work by both artists is available from 31 May to 14 June. Access to the conversation and screening are provided through the Eventive booking link.
‘Hadithi Hadithi: Place is mostly open space’ is a new moving image exchange centered on stories from Tanzania and Scotland that reimagine space through excavation of folklore and visual myth making. The featured artists use a variety of approaches rooted in pre modern storytelling such as oral narration, anthropomorphising, improv, allegory, and other gifts of unfettered make-believe for a recreation or reinterpretation of place, history, origin and identity. Taken together the work seek to visualise what stories, encounters, epiphanies and resolutions reside watchfully in unoccupied spaces. It will culminate in the first ever moving image exhibition at the Zanzibar International Film Festival.
Programme:
Gertrude Malizana, ‘Uwepo Wa Mwanamke, Presence of a Woman’, 2022. 10 min 40 sec.
Saoirse Wall, ‘The Leaf and the Saviour Guy’, 2020. 8 min 26 sec.
Online screening 31 May – 14 June with online conversation with the artists on 7 June at 6:30pm (GMT)
Gertrude Malizana, ‘Uwepo Wa Mwanamke, Presence of a Woman’, 2022
Through the eyes of a child searching for her mother across spaces where women operate in Dar es Salaam — this piece seeks to define ‘mother’ not as a noun, but as a verb, as acts of care performed by women.
Malizana uses familiar lullabies and other storytelling practices to synonymize the spaces and the acts of care with ‘mother’, and build their relationship with the child that moves through them.
Saoirse Wall, ‘The Leaf and the Saviour Guy’, 2020
The Leaf and the Saviour Guy is a fable-film, drawing together references from healing practices including the traditional culture of thermal springs and contemporary online tools for self-help and therapy. The Leaf and the Saviour Guy presents a reality in which water can heal patriarchal arrogance. The film proposes that criticism can be appreciated as care, that this can be joyful: ‘Dancing is an expression of this joy, as well as a way to consolidate this kind of learning in the body — a way to keep moving, to keep a movement going.’
The film incorporates methods of audio description and subtitling in the narration, techniques usually used to support blind and visually impaired people, or those who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing. The narration is voiced by the artist, and emphasises, through these multiple sensory channels, the shifting viewpoints and experiences materialised in the film of both the Leaf and the Saviour Guy characters.
This film was originally made for The Law is a White Dog, TULCA Festival, curated by Sarah Browne in 2020. This work was first available to experience as an audio-only version as part of a podcast series curated for the festival.When covid-19 restrictions were lifted, it was exhibited in Engage Art Studios, Salthill, in a room that was previously the waiting room of a medical centre, and before that, part of the complex of St. Joseph’s Industrial School, Salthill.
Forthcoming events in‘Hadithi Hadithi: Place is mostly open space’ include:
Programme 3:
Valerie Asiimwe Amani, Aichu mwii na ruwa okye [The sun and its god], 2022.
Sekai Machache, Profound Divine Sky, 2021.
Online screening 7 – 21 June with online conversation on 14 June at 6:30pm (GMT) /8:30pm East Africa Time (EAT).
Programme 4:
Zanzibar International Film Festival, 23 June, 7pm, (East Africa Time)
Previously as part of in‘Hadithi Hadithi: Place is mostly open space’:
Programme 1:
Online screening 24 May – 7 June
Rhona Mühlebach, Excitement Is Not Part Of My Feeling Repertoire’, 2021. 27 mins
Arafa C. Hamadi, ‘Kujiona: In Conversation With Kevin Mwachiro’, 2020. 26 mins.
Organised by Ajabu Ajabu Audio Visual House and LUX Scotland, supported by the British Council – in association with Zanzibar International Film Festival.
Image descriptions:
Image 1: A close up image of the side of an old sewing machine, a hatch has been slid open and a green bottle is pouring oil onto the mechanical parts.
Image 2: A Black person’s hands holds half of a coconut as they scrape the white insides against a serrated blade, a subtitle text at the bottom reads: ‘She is the sound of a coconut being grated,’.
Image 3: A blurry image looking upwards to a blue sky, a forested area appears to the left of the image. To the right a white figure leans over to look down at the viewer. A yellow subtitle text reads: ‘Saviour Guy enters your view from the right hand side’/
Gertrude Malizana
Gertrude Malizana is a creative filmmaker & multidisciplinary artist based in Tanzania devoted to telling stories as a means of documenting and preserving the lived histories of women. Gertrude’s work is informed by her own personal experiences and indigenous practices of feminism within her community. Gertrude is a founding member of Ajabu Ajabu – a group of practitioners actively working on the preservation, production, and presentation of audio-visual art.
Saoirse Wall
Saoirse Wall is an Irish artist working with moving-image, text and performance to articulate experiences that lack representation in social narratives of gender, health, and the body. In their work, scale, immersive sound, and suggestive gestures are manipulated to disrupt and discomfort. Their work has recently been screened and exhibited with TULCA, AEMI, LUX Scotland, Platform Arts Belfast and Hotel Maria Kapel. From 2018 – 2019 they participated in School of the Damned, a UK-based, peer-led alternative art school. In 2014 their film Gesture 2 was shortlisted for the inaugural Hennessy Portrait Prize and subsequently became the first moving-image work to be purchased for the National Gallery of Ireland Collection.
Ajabu Ajabu
Ajabu Ajabu is a collective of audio-visual practitioners based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania working on the preservation, production, and presentation of audio-visual art. Their work is centred around curatorial interrogations related to deconstructing bias across film cultures, platforming underrepresented narratives and modes of storytelling, and promoting amateur and experimental practice.
Darragh Amelia
Darragh Amelia is an audio-visual practitioner and curator whose creative production challenges the patriarchal narratives and hierarchical structures that exert control over the arts. Her hybrid work in film, moving image, and radio is collaboratively driven and imagines alternative modes of both practice and access. She is a founding member of Ajabu Ajabu.
Jesse Gerard
Jesse Gerard is a storyteller from Kasulu, Tanzania, currently working as a writer and curator in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He has curated extensively at Nafasi Art Space, a multidisciplinary art centre, where he has worked to support the artistic development of emerging artists and culture workers. His writing has been featured in journals such as Art Monthly, Nairobi Contemporary, The Black Explorer, and OFF TO. He is a founding member of Ajabu Ajabu.
Closed Captions
Both films are captioned
Closed Captions
Live captioning available for online conversation.