Iorio / Cuomo

a selection
of past and ongoing projects:

Chronicles of that time
Undead Voices
Appunti del passaggio
From thousands of possibilities
Twisted Realism
Towards a history
of the vanishing present
Sudeuropa

Jamii ya sinema.club
A cinema situation
Unfinished histories

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Jamii ya sinema.club

2022-ongoing

jamiiyasinema.club
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Credits

Jamii ya sinema.club is a platform for discussion and collective research devoted to film cultures and the arts of the moving image, which aims to contribute to debates on past, present and future developments in these expanded practices from a tropical position. The platform has grown out of discussions and meetings at Ateliers Picha and has opened to the public at the 2022 Lubumbashi Biennale in the form of a film society, a translocal, hybrid ciné-club. Mixing Swahili, French, English and street slang, its name is intended to evoke the sort of informal, almost familiar spaces (jamii means society, but also extended family) for contact and connection that the film society intends to establish. Jamii ya sinema.club has begun to organise public programmes (workshops, screenings, lectures and discussions) in Lubumbashi. These will become a local fixture in the months ahead, and will also expand internationally in the form of presentations, exhibitions and an online broadcasting platform. Following those Pan-African paths that have shown how film clubs can contribute, post-independence, to the emergence of rich film cultures on the continent, this project offers the opportunity to reflect on their past and future functions (places of "technocratic paternalism" marked by coloniality, later appropriated for resistance, liberation and self-determination); on the creation of autonomous forms of production and the development of alternative networks for the circulation of films; and on the relocation of film away from its historical commercial or institutional setting (cinemas) up to its contemporary migrations into the field of the arts. By making the film society an object of artistic speculation and experimentation, the project aims to reinvent this form and put into practice its potentialities as an assembly; as a situation where people are able to study and think freely; as a joyful celebration.

Jamii ya sinema.club was initiated by Maria Iorio / Raphaël Cuomo with Jackson Bukasa, Melissa Jina, Fils Ngeleka, Bibatanko Tankama and Lucrezia Cippitelli, artistic director of Ateliers Picha et curator of the Biennale de Lubumbashi #7

jamiiyasinema.club