StoryBoard House: an open space for Art & Stories

By
Penny Christodoulou
on
July 25, 2023

In collaboration with the Embassy of Foreign Artists (Geneva), StoryBoard welcomed Ghanaian-Nigerian filmmaker Nnenna Onuoha as an artist in residence this past fall. Nnenna spent two and half months researching archival material of the Biafran war in Nigeria and was able to access photographic and filmed evidence held by international organisations in Geneva. StoryBoard’s Penny Christodoulou spoke with her about her experience

 

Nnenna Onuoha is a Ghanaian-Nigerian researcher, filmmaker and artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her films and videos centre on Afrodiasporic voices, exploring the monumental silences surrounding the histories and afterlives of colonialism across West Africa, Europe and the US, asking: how do we remember? which past do we choose to perform and why?  A second strand of her work focuses on archiving Black experience in the present to chronicle how, amidst all this, we practice care and repair for ourselves and each other. Nnenna is currently a doctoral researcher in Media Anthropology at Harvard University and Global History at the University of Potsdam.

Could you tell us about your project? What brought you to Geneva?

My current project looks at the Biafran War as remembered by the children who experienced it, the generation who are now our elders. In Geneva, I've been specifically looking at the pictures of children from the War. One of the effects of the conflict was a loss of property, including pictures. So there's a whole generation for whom there are no photographs in family albums or national archives and yet, on the other hand, there are thousands and hundreds of thousands of images of them in the collections of humanitarian organisations here.

I initially started this project with my father, who was a kid during the war, and I collected audio relating to his and his brothers’ experiences. When I saw the open call for the Arts and Stories residency from the Embassy of Foreign Artists I thought that was a good opportunity to come to Geneva, find photos from this period and meet some of the international organisations’ archivists. In Geneva, I have been looking into the archives of the World Council of Churches, International Committee of Red Cross and the UNHCR.

As a researcher, what drove you to share your story through a documentary?

I have a background in film, as well as in history and anthropology, so depending on the project I decide what approach works best: whether it is something I want to use words for, or if it would work best through a time-based medium. In this case: this project is already inherently audiovisual: there are so many pictures and old films that were recorded of these children, so documentary seemed a fitting approach to continue telling the story.

The way I make films is always starting from the sound: I like to have the voices of the people whose stories I'm telling as a foundation and then add the pictures. Documentary allows me to have these pictures from the 60s and to have the people who these pictures were taken of, in dialogue with them: it is a way of creating a dialogue to involve them in the conversation today about how they were depicted during the war.

What is the message you want to convey with your documentary? 

One message that came out of an interview with a survivor was that there should be more conversation, and more remembering about what happened. After the war, the government policy of “No Victor, No Vanquished,” meant there was limited recognition of the tragedy that had been experienced. In this regard, it is very important to him that people start to face what happened and the impact that it had on his generation. As a child of somebody of that generation, it's a vision that I share. Creating a space for people to process and share this difficult experience has been important for me.

As a moving-image artist, I am also interested in this as a critique of representation. These images made 50 years ago were well-intentioned: photos of starving children were taken to raise support and funds for humanitarian action. But looking at them 50 years later, this imagery reads differently, quite often as dehumanising. Nevertheless, in a national context where silence has been the norm, these images might serve as a testament to what these children experienced. So it's interesting for me that beyond the intention for which the pictures were taken in the sixties, there is now the possibility for them to have such different lives and resonances now.

Here you can find more about Nnenna’s work:

https://nnennaonuoha.com/portfolio/baby-picture/ 

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