No-U-Turn Cinema • African Movie Night

Ellipses
Iana Stefanova
Audio-based document(ation) with captions
(2022, HD video, 52’)

Ellipses is an audio-visual work developed as a result of encountering, recording, and listening to memories of and reflections on migration experiences.
At the end of the 1990s, the economic crisis following the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe triggered migratory fluxes from countries of the so-called Socialist Block to Western Europe. This phenomenon was characterised by an unprecedented number of female migrants who started their migration projects predominantly by entering their host counties’ niche labour markets of care and housework.
Between the end of 2017 and 2019, the artist encountered Belarusian and Ukrainian women in different cities of the Italian Campania region, who generously offered her their stories.
The created mosaic of voices, based on these personal narrations and shaped by further conversations between the artist and these women, as well as by the artist’s own biography, represents a space where many subjectivities intertwine. Ellipses invites an audience to listen to the intersubjectivity that develops, but also to go beyond the semantic: to the omissions and silences, hesitations and hints.

(This work was developed as a part of a practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London, exploring the potential of listening practices to enable counter-narratives of gendered migration.)

Iana Stefanova is a Berlin-based cultural worker, researcher, and artist. Iana has long-term experience in analogue and experimental film practices through engagement with independent film collectives. Her artistic and research practices centre on the concepts of voice, language, and translation, and their relationship to (self)narration and the (ethical) encounter with each other. She has been newly exploring practices of listening that relate to these connections. Iana is currently a practice-based PhD candidate at the Screen School, LCC, University of the Arts London.

 

No-U-Turn Cinema is a once a month cinema evening that revolves around films made by Pan-African directors, people of African origin or living in the African diaspora.

The focus of the cinema evenings is to create a space for the precious often unseen view of these people who are far too often portrayed in a distorted light and distorted by narratives in the Western world. They are also often denied spaces of development and exchange and are often affected by discrimination and structural racism.

It is very important to us to broaden horizons and establish an Alkebu-lan (African) perspective in the film world of our fellow human beings.