Afi of Anteism Books
Adept within the realms of Film Studies, African/Indigenous Studies, and Visual Culture; her practice is driven by the aspiration to universalize the accessibility of historical and futuristic Afrocentric cultural productions. Through a contemplative approach, she seeks to find objective significance within the realms of the intangible, the complex, and the taboo.
Her new chapbook series “Emblematic Elusions: Eros in African Cinema” portrays how African filmmakers redefine the female[-presenting]’s body in the visual field from the wounded signifier to an embodiment of liberation. Rooted in her thesis monograph "Within Double Restraint", each edition presents a film essay analyzing a significant Black African movie.
The foundation of Afi’s publishing practice stems from her role as editing publisher of Anteism Books’. The house focuses on special edition artist books, monographs, and exhibition catalogs. Their history of collaboration is eclectic and wide-ranging involving practitioners pushing the boundaries of post-contemporary discourse within visual art, technology, music, and photography. Our hand-fabricated publications present artists such as Solange Knowles, Sougwen Chung, Matthew Hansel, Casey Reas, Eric Yanhker, and more.
Emblematic Elusions portrays how African filmmakers redefine the Black form in the visual field from the wounded signifier to an embodied vessel for liberation. Using an erotic lens, each edition presents a film essay analyzing a significant Black African movie.
Edition II looks unto Black African cinema's first sci-fi fiction Les Saignantes/The Bloodettes (2005) to survey how Jean-Pierre Bekolo futurizes, cinematically adapts, and therefore immortalizes the pre-colonial female ritual and society of mevungu. Power hierarchies are turned upside down by positioning the woman's erotic body as the healing vessel to the politically and sexually corrupt state. In both content and form, Edition II explores the futuristic underbelly of Yaoundé through coined Achille Mbembe's concepts of commandment, necropolitics, deathworlds, and jouissance.
Emblematic Elusions portrays how African filmmakers redefine the Black form in the visual field from the wounded signifier to an embodied vessel for liberation. Using an erotic lens, each edition presents a film essay analyzing a significant Black African movie
Edition I lays the foundation with Black African Cinema’s first feature, La Noire de…/Black Girl (Ousmane Sembène, 1966). The chapbook delves into the enduring erotic dynamics between Africa and Europe, tracing these themes from the history of early African cinema, which relied heavily on colonial support, to the sensual perceptions of Europe within the African psyche, as embodied by the protagonist Diouana. Black African cinema's first kiss scene is analyzed as a cry against the persistence of the neo-colonial power dynamic and the philosophical interplay between eros and death is highlighted as a vehicle of diasporic movement.
afila.si presents BLACK EXPERIENCE ISN’T A SPECTACLE, a referential catalogue offering a compilation of poetry, essays and visual artworks.
For its premiere exhibition carrying the same title, afila.si explored the legacy of the voyeuristic gaze in representations of the Black body. It intends to exist as a restorative gesture against the erasure of the Afrocentric perspective in [art] history.
Combining the spatial elements of a visual art gallery and a reading room, afila.si and Anteism Books invited their visitors to engage with individuals of African descent through the productions of our minds, our nuances and our non-monolithic approaches. This is expressed through a library curated by Venessa Appiah, as well as work by Jesse Katabarwa using image and literary sequencing as a means to generate and excavate living narratives. These works are to be consumed through embodiment with ibiyanε, a collection of sculptural chairs embedded in Sub-Saharan African reflections of physicality by Tania Doumbe Fines and Élodie Dérond.
Carrying titles by :
Chinua Achebe, Maya Angelou, Tanella Boni, Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, Kodwo Eshun, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Langston Hughes, Ruth Mayer, Robyn Maynard, V.Y. Mudimbe, Jean-Paul Sartre, Binyavanga Wainana, Derek Walcott
Includes works from: Christian Boakye-Agyeman, Élodie Dérond, Tania Doumbe Fines, Daouda Ka, Jesse Katabarwa, Karl Obakeng, Ouri, Sona Sadio, Tati au Miel