Film Screening: Zinzi Minott, Fi Dem III: Ancestral Interference
More details: https://www.spikeisland.org.uk/programme/events/zinzi-minott/
From Friday 30 October to Thursday 26 November 2020 Spike Island is streaming Fi Dem III: Ancestral Interference, a newly commissioned video work by artist and dancer Zinzi Minott, produced and commissioned by Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Spike Island, Bristol and Transmission, Glasgow.
Fi Dem is a durational moving image project and continued investigation into Blackness and Diaspora. On the anniversary of the Empire Windrush docking in the UK on 22nd June 1948, Minott returns to the work. Each iteration is a filmic manifestation of a year lived, a body moved and moving through a reflection on the legacies of The Windrush Generation.
Fi Dem III: Ancestral Interference, like preceding instalments of Minott’s project, invokes the HMT Empire Windrush’s mid-century voyage from Jamaica to London—except now we see it placed explicitly alongside emblems of the transatlantic slave trade. Minott is aware of the slave ship’s hold, stretching across centuries of Black Caribbean history into the present; an image of Covid-19 statistics overlaid atop a slave ship diagram tells us as much. But the artist also turns our attention to the legacies of Black Caribbean life, sound, resistance and communion within its diaspora. Fi Dem III: Ancestral Interference draws from personal and familial archives to chart several Black Caribbean journeys and narratives, some of which have been imaged and returned to throughout the series. For Minott, a trained dancer who was raised within sound system culture, Fi Dem’s clashing images and sounds are a way of ‘editing with the body’ to create the feeling of movement central to her training and to the migratory lives of Black Caribbeans.
Free, donations welcome.
