All those cultural manifestations were occasional, the only constant thing was storytelling, the orality. Tell stories was kind of a very important business, a thing to do at night in such way that if you want to tell a story in the daylight you have to kill an ant, otherwise your mom will die. At least that was what my grandmom told me. She used to only tell stories at night. But I think she was just mean, and she just didn’t want to tell stories at daylight, it is not like she had anything to lose because her mom was already dead.
So my first form of storytelling was through orality, stories and music. Then comes drawing, books, comics, theater later, and so on so on. Because the first film I watched were on reels, before the VHS, I learned a simple true: the movies were all about light, and they need dark. It was like my grandmom stories, she need the night to enlight us with her stories.
I couldn’t tell how images moves but I knew that they had to be projected. I knew the ultra-basics. Around 8 or 9 years old, some friends and I did our first movie. We traced a book from school in a transparent plastic sheet, and used a hand lantern to project the drawings on the wall and invented stories to the drawings. Smaller kids than us went to assist, and we even sell tickets, you had to pay a mango. We didn’t get much mangos but still. It was super fun.
Our film was just still image. The storytelling, the orality was the key. The stories we knew, that everyone knew, but that we adapt to our drawings that also everyone who went to school knew. It was just combination. What we used there, without knowing it was a mix of material archives, books, and immaterial archives, the stories, the memories, and some songs we learnt from Indian movies. (And we thought we created a new thing, we thought we invented the wheel).
My relation with storytelling and communication started with orality, it started with learning and exploring the immaterial archives that my grandmom held, my mom held, my dad, my family and all the people of my surroundings held. The songs, the folks tales, the proverbs, the riddles, the music, the dances, the rhythm… well, the joy and the happiness of sharing and warming each other's hearts.
Somehow this feeling from my children time shaped my path, what led me to here: MEDIATECA ABOTCHA. A place where, among other things, I can also explore the idea of archives. I work with Filipa, Sana and Suleimane, who, sometimes, are filmmakers, most of time just great people, and we are building there an archive of cinema, of sound, of writings, of seed, and moments and instant and memories and imaginaries are immaterial archives.
As performer and storyteller, who works with writing and orality, mostly, body and voice, I pay a special attention to the immaterial archives, collective memories, personal memories, stories that come from those. I know, for sure, that memories are a fabricated thing, a fiction built for the sake of individual, for the sake of communities and manipulated to build nations. In Guinea-Bissau I saw video of people cheering the tugas, then they hated the tugas, after the so-called independency, and we cheered Luis Cabral, and hated him, Nino, Kumba, and so on so on. Everyone in power try to create narratives that in his favour. Anyway… collective memories, collective fiction. Collective archives.
The same way we can access to the same material archives to produce different movies, different papers, or music, we also can access to the same collective imaginaries to produce different understandings, but I believe you know that better than I.
Yesterday, Didi Cheeka said something like “there is no point to have an archive that is inaccessible”. I completely agree, an unreachable archive is a dead archive. It is like some languages that disappeared already, and we hear that they existed or we suspect that they existed, but we cannot reach them.
I would like to add that an archive also should be intelligible. And also we should be aware that we cannot archive what doesn’t exist. Another thing that Filipa and I work with in Malafo are the archives that we normally call seeds, where threes, fruits, vegetables are codified. For instante, in Malafo, they told us they use to have more than twenty species of rice, but now the plant just around six species, and when we asked to name those more than twenty species, we could just gather around ten names. Archives are dying. And one of the killers are some NGOs in the subregion who are giving to the people transgenic seeds, because they are strong, they have short cycles, they don’t this, they don’t need that, but they also don’t leave any seeds, so the farmer have to go back next year to the NGO. And they guarantee, “don’t worry, don’t’ worry, who are here for you”.
For a population like Malafo or Guine-Bissau, that lean too much on self sustained agriculture, not being able to produce seed is a disaster of apocalyptical dimensions. Archives are dying.
Well, I don’t defend that all archives should be kept alive, or protected at any cost. Some archives, both material and immaterial archives, should be destroyed. Yeah. Destroyed. For instance, many of concepts we have in Bissau-Guinean traditions that we call ancestries are harmful, they are fictions that kill babies with Trisomy 21, fictions that enslave people who born with a vagina, giving them to marry immediately after they’re born, fiction that promotes female genital mutilation, among other so-called ancestries traditions thar promote homophobia, transphobia, racism, tribalism, that kill old people because they are considered witches or wizards. The question is, how to destroy those archives? I really don’t know. But we cannot mess with the collective archives, I think the strategy is filling them massively with new material, new imaginaries that are going to bury the old ones. The strategy we’ve been using is opening spaces of listening, through music, poetry and cinema, in Bissau mostly and my hometown, Sonaco, alongside with the works we do in Malafo. And I’ve also been opening spaces of speaking, through a program I called “Art in Space Public”, based on the concept “Art is a Public Space”. I go, with friends (don’t do anything without friends), we go from a place to another taking poetry, cinema and music, and ask the passing-by people and the resident to join us, and they do, and they speak their concerns. And the children also join us as well to sing, to dance, to say poems.
As I said in beginning, my imaginary started to be built by oral stories and songs, then with Bollywood, Hollywood and Chinese movies, and then European books, and so on… so, when I work with Bissau-Guinean children, I do a kind of curatorial works, selecting stories from within our cultures, or from Africa, from other communities more related to us. I opened moments to read poetry, to make music, to watch films, to read books, to discuss masculinities, because I believe we can fill our archives with new files more fun and more positive ones, I hope. Because I understand memories and archives as a space of creation not as a depositary.
And just to finnish, I would like to read a poetry from the movie Disco Dancer:
"Not of fair skinned
or dark skinned ones
The world belongs
to the good hearted ones
Let's smile and live,
let's smile and die
The world belongs
to crazy ones like us
May our songs echo
in the streets morning and evening
we're traders of songs,
that's our work
Not gold, not silver
we love songs
we have to live a few days here,
so be happy and live
If you want to do something,
then love a lot
Not of fair skinned
or dark skinned ones
the world belongs
to the good hearted ones”.
talk on archival assembly #2 in arsenal
