Filipa César
With support from Carleton University’s Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis and Film Studies Program, and The Goethe Institute in Montreal, Knot Project Space is proud to have present a special performance/reading by artist and filmmaker Filipa César. This live event also functioned as the reception for César’s short-term single-channel exhibition Conakry, which was on display at Knot Project Space from November 19th – December 1st. This reading/performance and its related exhibition were presented as part of a series of Fall/Winter 2019 programs and seminars at Knot Project Space looking at relationships between voice, fiction, collectivity and publication.
“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, was 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.” – text from Sonic Acts Festival (Amsterdam) who commissioned the original performance
67 Nicholas St, Ottawa, ON K1N 7B9