This dossier comprises two long-form interviews with filmmakers who use colonial-era archives as resources for a decolonial re-remembering of African and Afro-diasporic experience. Onyeka Igwe is a British filmmaker of Nigerian heritage who has worked since the late 2010s to critically refigure audiovisual and other documentary material from British and Nigerian archive spaces and collections. Petna Ndaliko Katondolo is a Congolese filmmaker, educator and ancestral ecologist who turns to films made in Congo under Belgian colonial rule as resources for an Afrofuturist reimagining of Congolese landscapes and bodies. A dossier Introduction draws out affinities between the two filmmakers in their approach to colonial archives. Both relocate and critically refigure colonial film footage and archival spaces through decolonial documentary and embodied performance practice. A further focus, emerging strongly in both interviews, is the use of sound as an embodied gesture that registers unseen presences in colonial archives; thus the archive is refigured as a site of intergenerational and ancestral African and Afro-diasporic histories, multiplicitous memories and dissident futurities.
Erica Carter & Bettina Malcomess, ‘Dossier: re-sounding the colonial archive. Decolonial archive practice in the films of Onyeka Igwe and Petna Ndaliko Katondolo’