Filipa César, Jin Mustafa – Meteorisations: Reading Amílcar Cabral's Agro-Poetics of Liberation

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER
Filipa César, Jin Mustafa – Meteorisations: Reading Amílcar Cabral's Agro-Poetics of Liberation
24 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

A reading of Amílcar Cabral’s agronomic writings exposes substrata of a syntax for liberation later performed in guerrilla language and the struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. This visual and sonic reading explores the definitions of soil and erosion that Cabral developed as an agronomist, as well as his reports on colonial land exploitation and analysis of the trade economy, to unearth his double agency as a state soil scientist and as a ‘seeder’ of African liberation. Cabral understood agronomy not merely as a discipline combining geology, soil science, agriculture, biology and economics but as a means to gain materialist and situated knowledge about peoples’ lived conditions under colonialism. The scientific data he generated during his work as an agronomist, along with his poetry, were critical to his theoretical arguments in which he denounced the injustices perpetrated on colonised land, and it later informed his warfare strategies.
Cabral used his role as an agronomist for the Portuguese colonial government subversively to further anti-colonial struggle. Cabral’s process of decolonisation was understood as a project of soil reclamation and national reconstruction in the postcolony. His agency as an agronaut ventures through soil cosmologies, mesologies, meteorisations, ‘atmos-lithos’ conflict zones, celluloid compost, violence of imperial consumption — the sugar question. Humble derives from Humus.

Performative lecture by Filipa César with sound by Jin Mustafa and images from Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes, 1974, Cape Verde.

This iteration of the lecture has been commissioned by Sonic Acts as a part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in the porous boundaries between the moving image and its reception, the fictional dimensions of the documentary and the economies, politics and poetics inherent to cinema praxis. Characterised by rigorous structural and lyrical elements, her multiform meditations often focus on Portuguese colonialism and the liberation of Guinea-Bissau in the 1960s and 1970s. This research developed into the collective project Luta ca caba inda (The Struggle Is Not Yet Over). She gained an MA Art in Context at the University of Arts, Berlin. Selected exhibitions and screenings include at the São Paulo Biennial, Manifesta 8, Cartagena, and the Contour 8 Biennial in Mechelen, Belgium, and Gasworks, London. Festival screenings include the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Curtas Vila do Conde, Forum Expanded at the Berlinale and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Jin Mustafa is a Stockholm-based visual artist, DJ and electronic music producer. Her work shifts between media, often taking the form of moving images, objects, sound and music. She is interested in the relationship between technology, imaginary spaces and questions of personal and collective memory. Recent exhibitions include I’m fine, on my way home now at Mossutställningar, Stockholm (2017); Ripple at Alta Art Space in collaboration with Signal, Malmö; If she wanted I would have been there once, twice or again at Zeller Van Almsick Gallery, Vienna; and a collaborative work with Natália Rebelo for Chart Emerging at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2018).