Month: July 2016

Spotlight On: Akosua Adoma Owusu

Leigh Anne Gialanella

[pb_slideshow group=”1″]

Akosua Adoma Owusu
Akosua Adoma Owusu

A few weeks ago, our team had the honor and pleasure of connecting with transnational filmmaker and producer Akosua Adoma Owusu. The avant-garde artist works in Ghana, the US, and in Europe making films that reflect the genre of “personal cinema.” Over the past several years, Owusu’s work has garnered prolific attention from a range of international academic institutions, museums, journals, and festivals.

Through the Audio-Visual Africa project, we aim to consult with Owusu about collecting and preserving her work. As a woman filmmaker who interrogates questions of diaspora, gender, blackness, and personal expression, we are excited by her unique vision and production. Owusu’s sharp and innovative films speak to the kind of motion picture material the Audio-Visual Africa project seeks to celebrate.

Read More

On the “Archival Sliver” and Audio-Visual Africa, Part 2

Leigh Anne Gialanella

Last week, we summarized South African archivist Verne Harris’s notion of the “archival sliver”, the belief that archives are only capable of capturing “a sliver of a sliver of a sliver” of the past (65). Harris developed his argument with reference to the apartheid regime in South Africa, citing instances in which government institutions expunged marginalized social and ethnic groups from the archival record. For a more detailed introduction to Harris’s argument, please refer to On the ‘Archival Sliver’ and Audio-Visual Africa, Part 1.

It is unrealistic to expect that the Audio-Visual Africa project will create archives encapsulating more than a sliver of African history and culture. The project rests on the assumption, however, that the sliver we archive will, in Harris’s words, “giv[e] voice to the voiceless” on a number of different levels (74).
Read More