African Women In Motion : A Film Lecture Series with Afi Venessa/Session 3

A three part film lecture series that explores the presence and importance of African women filmmakers led by Afi Venessa
About this Event

The Free Black Women's Library is a literary hub, reading room, Black Feminist archive, and community care space that features a free store, period pantry, backyard garden, reading club, weekly book swap, and a wide array of free public programs, as well as a collection of over 5000 books written by Black women and Black nonbinary authors.
This social art project was created by artist and cultural worker OlaRonke Akinmowo in 2015, and is funded by merchandise sales and direct donations.
Sustain her work by becoming a monthly patron at ❤️
The Free Black Women's Library
presents
African Women in Motion/Session 3
A film series led by Afi Venessa
The Cost of Being Seen: Circulation, Visibility & The Present Image

Where Session I questioned the archival absence of pioneering filmmakers, and Session II traced how the next generation laboured to navigate the means of production;This session sits us in our own moment and asks: what does visibility cost, and who sets its price? We turn to our contemporary transnational generation of African women and Black diasporic audiovisual artists working outside the festival circuit and within the new infrastructures that carry their experimental images: streaming platforms, museum walls, international art markets. Through them we consider how being seen everywhere, hypervisibility itself, can become its own kind of capture.

We engage with the work of Onyeka Igwe, Aïcha Macky, Katy Léna Ndiaye, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Ng'endo Mukii, and Mónica de Miranda amongst several others.

These are women working through the essay film, the personal documentary, the found-footage collage, making images that refuse the tidy grammar of the big screen. Yet, the exit from the 'mainstream' is not an exit from limiting forms of ownership. To circulate and self-sustain, the work reaches smaller, more accessible screens -the phone, the laptop, the gallery wall, the biennale - only to fall under more compromising powers. If what remains of the archive marginalized African women, the present risks a subtler erasure: the celebrated image, unmoored from the communities it came from and made legible for elsewhere.

In a moment sharpened by boycott and divestment, to place a film is to reckon with what its host underwrites. Political allegiances, war investments, and environmental costs are borne by the streaming giants and art-world patrons who now hold the keys. Circulation becomes an ethical calculation, and every screen is also a shareholder.

How do we circulate and screen this work without repeating that displacement? And what would it mean to reclaim not visibility alone, but its terms, its impact, and a continuous praxis for reckoning with the costs of being seen?