1 - Images and Invisibility, Displacement and Performance in the Makonde Response to Visual Archives

Presentation Abstract
I will reflect here on images I made in 2020 with the Makonde in Mozambique, a response to the ethnographic images filmed by the ethnologist Margot Dias between 1951 and 1962 as part of the so-called "Ethnic Minority Missions". In this process of elicitation, sounds and images provoked a sensorial response, an embodied cinema invested, through the very process of seeing, with ideas of belonging. The camera imposes special ways of engaging with the world and these often force filmmakers to step outside themselves and adopt intermediate positions, without knowing the outcome. How do film archives function? As a reminder or as a historical place that leaves the indelible mark of the original encounter and the decisions that the filmmaker made at the time of filming? How is it that, in the process of returning these films to their origins, they provoke a sense of ethnic rather than national belonging? Ethnographic film archives of the past are historically and culturally constructed versions of reality, but the question is how we, ethnographic filmmakers and contemporary artists, critically approach the issue of the document as evidence, producing heritage subversions, circulations and mobilizations in Lusophone post-coloniality. The images shown to Makonde were constructed as evidence and that is how they are perceived by people and to this extent a traumatic historical episode such as the so-called Mueda Massacre (1962) will be a starting point for thinking about the perception and heritagization of violence, revived in the absence that is found in Margot Dias' ethnographic archives.