Found Futures 3: Petna Ndaliko Katondolo: ZAMANI – The Archive as a Living Ecology / Didi Cheeka: War on Memory – The Forgotten History of Nigeria's Post-war (1967-70) Cinema

ZAMANI – The Archive as a Living Ecology
Presentation by Petna Ndaliko Katondolo

Zamani is a collective of film series and research project emerging from Soul-full Soil Cinema, developed within the Yolé Ecosystem by Chanda Agirwe, Mickael-Sltan Mbanza, Weza Nikuze, Melanie Zawadi, Sifa Mukeshimana and Petna Ndaliko Katondolo through Yolé Film Space in Eastern Congo. It approaches the colonial archive as a space of dismemberment, where images participated in separating people, land, knowledge, ancestors and more-than-human relations from one another. Rather than seeking to restore or correct the colonial archive, Zamani asks what happens when these images are removed from their position of authority and treated as visual compost: material that can decompose and enter into new relations with contemporary landscapes, oral histories, rituals, plants, bodies and community memory. Through the practice of Archipointing, living and healing plants are projected onto colonial monuments, historical buildings and archival images, transforming spaces marked by extraction into sites where other relationships can become imaginable. Producing archive, within this practice, is not simply about preserving the past, but about restoring the conditions through which life, memory and relations can continue.

The research asks: Can cinema transform the archive from an architecture of dismemberment into a living ecology from which new relations can grow?

War on Memory – The Forgotten History of Nigeria's Post-war Cinema (1967-70)
Presentation by Didi Cheeka

Nigerian cinema took shape in the western parts of Nigeria, under the impact of the petroleum-fueled boom of the 70s, insulated from the ravages of a war that was mostly fought in the eastern parts, formerly known as Biafra. The 70s – the post-Biafra war years, a period of economic boom following the Arab oil embargo on the USA – were a strange mix of optimism, dreams and despair. Of defeat, disillusionment and ambition. It was also a time of silence, a time of forgetting, a time of migration and exile from memory. It was in this atmosphere that national memory took shape – completely exiled from history. Exploring the period, this film project considers the question: what can cinema reveal about political amnesia?

Petna Ndaliko Katondolo a Congolese born filmmaker, ancestral ecologist, and founder of Yolé!Africa. His artistic practice reimagines archives as living relationships between people, land, memory, and more-than-human worlds. Through Soul-full Soil Cinema and Archipointing, he creates participatory works that reconnect ecological knowledge, embodied memory, and community storytelling as practices of restoration. His films, performances, and research cultivate narrative sovereignty, ecological memory, and community-led futures across the Congo Basin.

Didi Cheeka is a filmmaker working with found image and sound. He is the founder and artistic director of Decasia – Berlin-Lagos Archive Film Festival. Didi is also the initiator of Nigeria’s Analogue Remains: An Archive of Lost Films and Network of African Archivaland Audiovisual Studies. He has produced critical writing on films and published on archives and memory practice in edited collections and journals. Encounter in the Archive: The Struggle to Reclaim Nigeria’s Audiovisual Heritage, currently in production, is his upcoming first monograph.