Collaborative Workshop: Shadows and Screen - Reimagining Africa

This workshop explores how mediated memories, stereotypes, and media shape imaginations of the African continent
About this Event

This one-day collaborative workshop, "Shadows & Screens: Reimagining Africa," explores how mediated memories, stereotypes, and media shape imaginations of the African continent. Tribal African Art in avant-garde painting, as much as mass media such as photography, film and television have played an important role in producing Africa as a coherent continent. Participants will dissect "screen memories" - distorted, fragmented recollections that obscure deeper truths - and use sensory storytelling to challenge dominant, colonial narratives and celebrate authentic, multifaceted African realities.

We will look at examples of early ethnographic photography, depicting people as ‘racial types’ that were totally taken out of cultural context from their everyday lives and personal character and introduce counter narratives by contemporary African artists restaging such images and reusing African material culture in new ways.

Moreover, African landscapes and culture, and especially the depiction of animal wildlife as entertainment has a long tradition in Western television documentary filmmaking and people’s imagination. Mass media, predominantly created by white Western filmmakers, have frequently depicted Africa as safari parks full of colourful secrets that was often fuelled by pure fantasy. Only with the emergence of African cinema from the 1960s onwards, other stories began to emerge, focusing on the legacy of colonialism, the failures and hypocrisy of the new African bourgeoisie, the constraints of religious and oppressive traditions, corruption, and the strength of African women.

Workshop I - Deconstructing the Screen. Participants analyse archival footage, vintage media, photography, or popular media (news items, films) that has shaped "imaginations of Africa."

Activity: Group analysis of common tropes (pity, exoticism, wilderness) and how they obscure local realities, using examples of colonial remnants.

Workshop II - Memory Book for Africa

Using materials like cut-out photos and text fragments, participants create a "Memory Book" page that tackles a specific, perhaps distorted, memory of an African place or experience and introduces a resurrected healed image of the African continent.

Highly recommended museum visits before and after the course:

Barbican: Art Exhibition: Project a Black Planet

Tate Britain: (free exhibition) Zineb Sedira: When Words Fall Silent, Cinema Speaks...

British Museum: (free exhibition) Africa display, basement

Tutors

Adam Njenga is a Kenyan actor and storyteller based in London.

Dr Barbara Knorpp is a visual anthropologist with a special interest in film history based in London.

This event is part of the Anthropology Summer School London held near Victoria Park, Hackney and online. More info on our events and courses: [email protected]