Effects of Wording, by Catarina Simão.

EFFECTS OF WORDING, by Catarina Simão.

A Super 8 film, shot in 1967 in Dar-es-Salaam, shows the rehearsal of
a theatrical play; a white man guides a group of young black men.
Slow temporality and tender relations can be felt between them that
contrasts with the revelation of the acting scene: an inert body is
forced to a rendition movement. There are palm trees in the landscape
and a sign fixed to the ground shows the words, “The Mozambique
Institute”. Archive images always hold the promise to retain any
historical truth, but this promise comes often coupled with potential
disloyalty, when a simple transposition of context will, in time, in
space, betray it without too much effort. As a short visual essay,
Effects of Wording feels free to exhaust the notion of the archive as
a driving force and sign of “reading the world” by looking – on three
different continents – the story of the Institute of Mozambique, the
first anticolonnial school of Mozambique.

Effects of wording is part of the video installation “The Mozambique
Institute Project” that was performed for the first time in the Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (2014, Madrid), in the context of
the Really Useful Knowledge exhibition, curated by the Croatian group
WHW.


Credits:
Effects of wording |The Mozambique Archive Series
Stereo sound Video HD color, 29’
By Catarina SImão
Editor Fernanda Gurgel
Lisbon, 2014