Venues:
MAC Birmingham – Hexagon Theatre
Chaos Magic, Nottingham

Partners: Flatpack Festival and The British Film Institute (Film Feels Hopeful Season)

Artists: Cairo Clarke, Raisa Kabir, Ebun Sodipo

‘Where the restless oceans pound’ is a film programme that explores decolonial approaches to the ocean in order to tenderly renegotiate lost histories and call forth a future of affirmation. The programme takes its name and inspiration from the Audre Lorde poem ‘A Woman Speaks’. It features three short films ‘in the absence of ruins’ by Cairo Clarke, ' নীল. Nil. Nargis. Blue. Bring in the tide with your moon...' by Raisa Kabir, and ‘And The Seas Bring Forth New Lands’ by Ebun Sodipo.

Cairo Clarke ‘in the absence of ruins’ proposes a generative methodology, queering archival practices to “develop different relationships to a past we are currently making and a future also forged by us”. Clarke weaves together a layered narrative in which Pompeian materials – such as the carbonised remains of garlic, onion and lentils, as well as ancient marine shells – offer a starting point to read historical trade routes and geo-cultural exchanges across Europe, Asia and Africa through the lens of her own personal history as a British-born member of a family of Caribbean and Indian heritage

Raisa Kabir’s film uncodes the historical and material connections between Scotland, Bengal and the Caribbean. The work explores the watery languages of matrilineal trauma, and the attempts to find an emotional literacy, unspoken between generations and across diasporas.

Ebun Sodipo makes work for those who will come after: the black trans people of the future. Her sprawling practice, encompassing film, performance, installation, fiction, poetry, and sound, is focused on devising new language with which to imagine and speak about the body, creating new modes of thinking and feeling the past, and filling, in some way, the gaps and breaks of the archive(s) of modernity, all pertinent technologies for those with a subjugated history.