ON COLLECTIVITY
DATE: 17-11-24
TIME: 20:37
AUTHOR: HANNAH FLEISCH
DESIGNER: PAULINE HILL
IMAGE COUNT: 9
TAGS: X
The preservation of film is often thought of as static and secluded; dusty shelves sequestered away from fingerprints, light and any other conditions that might threaten the fragile celluloid. While this reflects one aspect of the archival project, beyond the storage of the physical film itself preservation has a social dimension in which films are given life through their presentation. The sharing, reproduction, remixing, re-interpretation and revisiting of films preserve their place in history beyond the silent presence of the physical object.
In the African context, the film landscape is in constant flux. Its complicated and composite history of development, national cinemas, and video booms have led way for a new wave of African creatives that are reframing film culture transnationally across the continent. A focus on local audiences is a key element of preservation in this area, built on the concept that cinematic preservation opens access to local audiences and nourishes their interest in the medium. There is a growing network of collective production, with spaces emerging to strengthen and centralise the resources, particularly in the sector of independent filmmaking, of creatives in an industry that is in many cases historically underfunded and nationally underdeveloped. Ajabu Ajabu is one of these collectives that has made their efforts in community building, presentation and film preservation inextricable.
Ajabu Ajabu emerged in 2020 during the Covid pandemic, as both a physical platform and a flourishing network of local artists and collectives. Calling themselves an “AV House,” their center of operations is a space in Dar es Salaam that hosts many workshops, film screenings, exhibitions and other arts-related events. Across their social media is a stream of projects, events and campaigns that the collective is undertaking. They resist simple definitions, as their membership and interests continuously expand.
The work of Ajabu Ajabu began with a focus on film, starting with retrospective screenings of African cinema including Ousmane Sembene’s Mandabi (1968), Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973), Souleymane Cisse’s Finye (1982), and Suhaib Gasmelbari’s Talking About Trees (2019), among many others. The collective has involved cast and crew members of productions in their screenings to extend the audiences’ engagement with the films. These presentations transform these films into open texts with ongoing, fluid and collaborative meaning. Beyond screening films, the collective has produced original documentaries and facilitated the distribution and translation of many older African films that local audiences had previously lacked access to.
I spoke with two Ajabu Ajabu founders, Darragh Amelia and Jesse Mpango, about Ajabu Ajabu’s journey and burgeoning identity. Both members described the collective as having “etcetera energy” in terms of its ever-evolving list of members. Darragh describes the “alchemy” of the collective coming together in their first film, Apostles of Cinema (2022).
Apostles is the first documentary released by the collective. It revolves around the various facets of Dar es Salaam’s film landscape. The film highlights the unlikely characters that breathe life into local film culture, from DVD sellers to film translators to backyard cinema exhibitors. While these spaces are rarely formalised and depend on DIY methods, they are a critical and highly in-demand feature of local entertainment. In particular, Apostles traces a highly material, grassroots expression of the internet and its mechanics; one in which films are downloaded from YouTube onto discs and USBs, before reaching their audiences in the physical, public formats typically invoked by cinema. This media ecosystem also democratises access to films from across the globe; from India, Korea, China and Hollywood, curating an audience beyond typical borders.
Another standout of Apostles is DJ Black, whose role as a movie translator, sometimes called a “DJ” or a “veejay,” is defined not by translating films directly into Swahili, but by performing his own commentary and interpretation of the narrative. This connects to the now ubiquitous vein of online streamers— where the brand of charisma and vernacular of these DJs informs an audience’s choice of screening as much as the movies themselves. This practice also connects it to other cinema traditions and histories. Added commentary traces back to an older tradition of cinema exhibition in which silent films had live commentators to linguistically and culturally translate films for local audiences. A non-linear back-and-forth between filmmakers, translators and audiences ties the work of the collective to traditions of political Third Cinema movements originating in South and Central America in the 1960s.
This generous storytelling paints a unique picture of the vibrant interest and innovation in film culture across the city. At the centre of the documentary is an ongoing project of Ajabu Ajabu’s surrounding the film Maangamizi: The Ancient One (2001) directed by Ron Mulvihill and Martin Mhando. Released in 2001, the film saw critical acclaim but was largely unseen by local audiences and quickly became inaccessible due to language and exhibition barriers. The film is a mystical drama involving spirituality, transnational personal histories and relationships and is a combination of Swahili and English. Working with the directors and local film professionals, Ajabu Ajabu has connected the Tanzanian-made film with new audiences to make it accessible to local audiences and preserve it as a part of film history. Apostles of Cinema has travelled to several festivals globally and is now available online, distributed by WeTransfer .
Stepping into conversation with Darragh Amelia and Jesse Mpango, I am immediately amid a friendly transnational catch-up. Darragh and Jesse are professionally good at including people in conversation and even before discussing the collectives’ work and films, Jesse gleefully shared with both Darragh and me the materials of a recent exhibition in Europe for another project involving members of Ajabu Ajabu. Our conversation spanned the general topology of film in Tanzania to the specifics of running and screening films within Ajabu Ajabu’s space in Dar es Salaam.
HANNAH: I would love to start at the beginning. On your website, you have “preservation, production and presentation” as the three core pillars. How did you arrive at that?
JESSE: Out of those three, “presentation” is definitely the start— a space, a screening space, a cinema, a place to expand on access to African cinema. If I were going to order it, I would say that the “preservation” came next because of the responses to some of the films that we were showing, in particular among them Maangamizi. I still remember, I think one of the inflection points of this journey was the screening of Maangamizi in our space, and the Q&A with the directors Ron and Martin in particular. They were just saying that this is the Dar es Salaam premiere… Maangamizi had only been screened in a few places. It was essentially one of the only times that they were able to talk to a Tanzanian audience about this film, and the response from the audience [was reflected in] how long the Q&A went! We had a little camera that was very slow for some reason (I think it was because of the length of the cable to the speakers). So the laptop was a little bit slow and for the Q&A there was a queue. You’d sit down and then get to ask your question, and then move away. That moment, it was a pretty special moment.
Preservation, in terms of access, was a recurring question. Thinking both about the artefact of the film as something that does contain all of the questions that we need to ask, and then also [when it comes to] the access to the filmmakers. Martin Mhando and his energy and his openness to different formats and approaches to engaging with the film, that felt like preservation. It could also be a way of questioning certain assumptions about what it means to preserve something which usually ties into hiding it away in a safe place away from people so that it can be referenced by the people who have the right language and access, but not to circulate openly. So “preservation” came next.
From there, as that journey unfolded, as we invited in different mediums and different practitioners to engage with the film, as we wrote about it, as we did a retrospective, as we screened it in different places, as it was dubbed, capturing that journey really led to the “production” element. The fact is that we do work with different artists, and we have invited different artists for all these separate programs and have a filmmaker, Gertrude, who’s also a founding member. So production was a natural way that the “preservation” part can be held, and the voices and our eclectic combination of ideas can be made tangible.
I think that the loose, anti-formal, improvisational aesthetic was right there from the beginning. Even with the name Ajabu Ajabu, which means “peculiar” or “strange.” At first, “presentation” was natural but as we were thinking about anchoring all of these eclectic things, the other “p’s” made sense. That was the ground in which we could all exist in our most multiple and interesting selves, but also where we could be most open and inclusive and inquisitive within our context.
HANNAH: I love that screenings are such a huge part of that mission. You speak about this moment at the premiere of Maangamizi in Dar es Salaam and all these interactions with filmmakers for a lot of your screenings. I’m interested in how having these audiences and live discourse has changed the way that these films feel to you.
DARRAGH: It was something that brought us closer to the films that we were working with and around. It brought down this barrier that was assumed before we developed the space and that speaks to this hierarchy of access that we were really interested in disrupting through the space. When we started realising that filmmakers were a lot more accessible, especially during the time when we had forged the space which was around Covid, so conversations were becoming more digital and more fluid internationally, it became something that we really prioritised within every screening.
I mean, of course Maangamizi was something we wanted to work with the directors on for the re-release. But then all of the screenings had this element of incorporating the filmmaker or somebody who worked around the film. This whole process of developing a space that’s focused on preservation, production, and presentation, it’s about looking at a film holistically and allowing those different facets of its existence to come together to make sure that the audiences are aware of that and are a part of it in a meaningful way.
JESSE: Yeah, I really agree. The accessibility was kind of a surprise. I remember us celebrating some of the responses we’d get because it just felt like “What? This person was just there on the other side of an email?” and they’re keen to access and have their film enter this context, and are also trusting us that we can tell the story in the right way. And then our responsibility to the audience as well, we found we kept building language around and building a process around. I think it was the fact that a screening space is physically oriented a certain way, the fact that our interest in certain films felt individual because we’d seen them at different times, so in that moment when all these different things come together, that convergence, it was the engine actually, it was what was really special about what a screening space can do and can mean and thinking as expansively as possible about that was exciting.
HANNAH: On screening space: could you reflect more on what the physical space means to you? You’ve moved before and now you’ve exhibited internationally, transnationally, all over. There was, during Covid, this online space... What does space mean to the collective?
JESSE: I think it’s the shared resource. Right in the beginning, we weren’t necessarily thinking of it, as you know, as a collective. We’d be working together to create these moments but then, as these moments started to add up, and as this story started to unfold, the idea that we could work together and have all these different perspectives and skills and interests but produce something that we could all own equally, that over time would start to tell its own story that we would be able to learn from. Space was crucial in making that possible, in being able to bring our resources materially, mentally and physically, into a place where they could grow into something that’s larger than the sum of its parts, being able to have just a little slice of the craziness that is Dar es Salaam. There is a lot that we could experiment and spend time together, and find ideas, and then be able to share that in quite an open way without any formalised structure.
I remember early on, the first space was sort of open to the public and we started spending time there and working out of there. I think the nature of Dar es Salaam, the fact that there are all these different kinds of economies made it hard for people to [realize], “So I can just come here and work and we can just chat?” Just saying there weren’t any barriers was not enough until [the space] started to become lived-in and then those barriers started to fall down. That was the basement of a building where Darragh lived for a time, where I lived for a time, and that was then subsequently sold. And so last year we did pop-up screenings around the city for a while, when we didn’t have a space. That introduced us to new spaces and new people and allowed us to really situate ourselves where we are right now. But through all of those, even when the space wasn’t just a singular physical space, the way that we would activate it and the way that we would approach those screenings was based on everything we’d learned from the previous space. When you look at it, at least in hindsight, or when we’re looking at the shared resource of our programs, there is quite a clear continuity. It’s both a shared resource in the sense that we all bring our different perspectives and skills to it but it’s also something that we can all access equally, and we can all use to define and grow our approach to a medium that we really care about.
I’m increasingly using “screen culture” and increasingly calling it “Ajabu Ajabu Screen Collective” because I feel referring to one mode of cinema is not accurate or useful, but when we gather and when we put something on, and when we talk about it in a certain way that our relationship to the medium of the “moving image,” if we can use that term, means or what it can do continuously evolves in interesting and exciting ways, and our audiences are consistently surprising us with new ideas and new approaches. The people that we work with, like some people that have become a part of the collective, came into it through just participating in our screenings or bringing an element of their art to our screenings. Even the number of how many people are at Ajabu Ajabu is very fluid, I think that’s a spatial element that’s not possible without being able to have a site for all of these things
to coalesce.
DARRAGH: We’ve been to a lot of spaces around film internationally and there’s definitely something about the fluidity of Ajabu Ajabu. There’s such an elitist form to a film space, in many worlds and parts of the world and it reinforces those ideas that we’re working against which are connected to preservation and where film is stored and where people are able to get windows and glimpses into film and film culture. When the barriers are assumed or are intentional and clear, that’s what hinders access and open and inclusive engagement within film and film culture. I feel that in different places, this exclusive energy around film. Within Dar es Salaam, that’s the complete opposite and within Ajabu Ajabu, like the space itself, is actively working against it.
HANNAH: The work that Ajabu Ajabu does is locally specific and attentive to your audiences but in the same breath it’s inclusive and versatile and mobile. You’ve had so many collaborations across platforms. I’ve seen you collaborate with people in fashion and art and music and sound artistry. I’m interested in asking more about your openness as a collective to welcoming those art forms, how it’s influenced the collective thinking, how it’s influenced the space and any highlights of some of those projects.
JESSE: I will bring it back to the period in which we were working around Maangamizi and inviting different interpretations. During the retrospective, there was a poster exhibition. Ajabu Ajabu is an audio-visual house, and so it was screen and sound at the beginning and then unfolding and looking at how that medium can expand and contract depending on what people are bringing into it. The spark of the fashion [collaboration] was part of the re-release of Maangamizi. It was a night when we had a photo-shoot reimagining the premiere based on an aesthetic from classic African cinema, that 90s and 80s fashion, but also giving people room to perform rather than just engage with [the film] passively. I think engagement, using multiple formats to create multiple entry points, those entry points create agency and a sense that you are contributing to this. That passion, or inspirational care, always works both ways. Whatever it is that you’re taking from this film can equally be given back to it through your own creativity. We’re just curious about a lot of things. We are fortunate that Dar Es Salaam has so much DIY energy, people reinventing and reimagining themselves in so many different ways. I would determine it as a way of continuing to reframe these stories in a way that doesn’t prioritise consumption and being passive and being quiet but in a way that can contain so much of the eclectic nature of the city and the eclectic stories that surround us, and our own eclectic experiences, and just make that tangible, visible, and valuable.
DARRAGH: Also allowing a film to exist in time, allowing it to deconstruct and reconstruct through different forms across time and space as well.
JESSE: Some highlights... I love the sound workshop that Darragh did and some of the work that was produced out of that. Working with the fashion collective Mervki is always amazing – the first thing was the Maangamizi photo-shoot and they also did a festival in our new space which was incredible. Recently, as an extension of that, we had an artist in Dar es Salaam whose work I’ve loved for a long time, Larry Achiampong, who creates these speculative works based on sort of Pan-African cosmologies, and his approach in that he works with sound and video and performance — it was very affirming.
I think that’s the through-line between all of these different things — at first, they seem very out there, but we’ve been able to find a network in which they increasingly kind of fit and expand. I certainly myself am more confident about following our own curiosity, following the things that we’re interested in, even if they’re not directly related to film and a screening space. DARRAGH: Another highlight would be DJ Black and encountering his practice and finding new ways to engage with it and highlight it. I think his work and his world within film is very inspiring and grounded in kind of what Ajabu Ajabu is questioning or operating within.
HANNAH: Ajabu Ajabu works with so many different collaborators and collaborates with other collectives as well. Collectivity is such an interesting way of framing work. I think so often I have encountered people or narratives that have an “auteur,” this one artist who is the owner of work. Many groups of people get called collectives retrospectively. But then there are also collectives who kind of call themselves collective. I wanted to touch more on for Ajabu Ajabu what “collective” means, and also how that’s impacted your own individual work as well.
JESSE: Yeah, great question. It means different things according to where we are on that journey. And I guess I’m specifically talking about the shift between the first formative elements, and of during COVID, having the space and being able to move outwards from there and then trying to think of how this space can be mobile. The assumption in some of the places, or some of the conversations that I’ve had, is the idea of a collective as a frame or a container. You’re moving statically as a unit that is multiple. But I don’t think that is how it functions at all. It’s a certain trust that you [have], in the ways in which we can come together, and in your communication being able to be quite fluid and being able to have this part in which all of your voices are there. Being able to wander in one direction and come back with something and have a place in which it can be something that matters to multiple people and can generate different entry points. I think it’s just like being able to flow. We really have almost a contradictory sense of being able to be fluid and have agency and bring your voice and your opinion within a process that’s not about separation.
It’s constantly about connection. You’re bringing things in from all these multiple points but using them as a way of connecting even deeper with the people around you. Then finding a language collectively about what it means to be able to carry those ideas in a space or a format that is a result of that, rather than as something that has been preconceived on certain metrics or certain shapes. Coming from entering art through a very institutional framework, and in a very careerist and linear mode – that’s unhealthy, that’s lonely, and that’s just continuously an act of separation and an act of hire and an act of building these new hierarchies and then thinking, “Okay, so what is an alternative to that?” And then being able to find and insist on those alternatives with other people who are also, similarly, in one way or another, feeling that they’re being pushed towards owning their ideas individually or using their ideas to move away or to separate from others. I think the word that I use quite often these days is “convergence.” I think productivity is an act of convergence for both the medium and our own sense of agency - being able to act in the present with things that have happened before and with ideas about what’s possible in the future.
DARRAGH: There is something to be said about how we were pretty opposed to the notion of the “auteur” from the beginning of our practices in and around the space, and especially when you’re working within the realm of documentary (which is what a lot of the work has been). You’re working with so many different people’s voices and you’re representing voices that aren’t your own and through your own, and through many people through this convergence of ideas. It just does not feel right to ever produce something that is singular, in that nothing is.
HANNAH: At the end of your film, it’s like, “this is like Ajabu Ajabu’s film” with a declaration of “we” – this is quite a powerful way of claiming identity and space.
DARRAGH: AA was more of an assertion of the ideas and the questions, because AA is an idea and a concept more than any individual, or even collective of individuals. Even the word collective is something that we’ve all felt differently about at different times or shifted away from. It isn’t necessarily about asserting, even like AA, as like the creator of that thing. It’s the creator of the idea or it’s the source of the ideas.
DA shared the quote from Gertrude (another cofounder of Ajabu Ajabu):
“Ajabu Ajabu is people and ideas, it doesn’t have to be Dar or Msasani, it lives in us, you are Ajabu Ajabu, I am Ajabu Ajabu and when we meet to engage in the work then we are both Ajabu Ajabu.”
HANNAH: I really appreciate that. It’s a difficult thing to document. The meaning of the film and your project changes, depending on who is interacting with it, who’s watching it, what kind of conversations you’re having around it, who takes that project and changes it.
I wanted to go back to some of the things that are brought up in Apostles of Cinema. I’m very interested in what is kind of deemed amateur practice in the dubbing practices and the pirated DVD sales and the backyard cinemas, and the way that they all actually also operate within a kind of preservation, because access and a living memory is the way that you keep these films alive. Would you consider revisiting that process of preservation with another film? What does preservation look like in the Tanzanian film landscape
in general?
DARRAGH: From the get-go with this project, we wanted it and (still) want it to be a larger project around preservation. Martin, the co-director of Maangamizi, does have a collection of films that are also quite inaccessible within Tanzania and so we’ve always planned on kind of working around that collection and finding new ways to bring it to life and bring it into circulation again.
JESSE: We’re thinking about films from Tanzania that haven’t even been digitised yet, about access to African cinema in general, and about how the lives these films could lead within spaces, these anti-formal spaces that do have their own language and format in community, and sort of engaging with them as agents for bringing these films home in a way. Not having them be like a lot of the canon of African cinema that requires this kind of adjacency to Europe or America to be able to access, but finding how they can be able to move in these circles with other supposedly “lower” or more popular or populist media.
In terms of Tanzania, specifically, one of the things that is beginning to emerge, and it’s quite exciting, is building a new or more relevant language to the experimentation that Dar es Salaam- based filmmakers and Tanzanian filmmakers do all of the time by virtue of working directly with their community, by using DIY strategies, and a lot of that just gets completely erased by the idea that these are low budget, or like it’s the technical questions – which are often financial questions really— are so much louder and drown out whatever the filmmakers trying to do, where they come from, what references they have.
The volume of work that is being produced in the region is insane. There are so many films coming out and being screened in different ways but the narrative within the local structures is [that] we need to build these films and these filmmakers up to a point at which they can stand in a festival setting and be able to have both the technical knowledge and the access and the language to be a global player.
I think part of the preservation is looking at the contribution of that history of experimentation and making it visible enough so that storytellers can access it and position it differently. The work of positioning that work differently is important. You have a whole library and a history of cinema that you can engage with on terms other than financial terms or material terms but in “Where was this filmmaker from? What stories are they telling? What tools are they using? What were references from the local scene that are embedded? What references from the international scene are embedded? What is the influence of music and soap opera and television?” There are so many great conversations you can have on a local level that are undermined by the hierarchy within cinematic discourse. It’s exciting thinking about what the process of unpacking that could mean. This is a question I’m finding in different contexts as well. There are a lot of DIY projects, a lot of weekend film projects, kids’ film projects, that are about giving kids a camera and letting them tell their own story but framing it with a level of respect and agency where they feel that their story is valued. Not necessarily kids only but anybody, “amateurs” in the grand scope of things. With the visibility and infrastructure now, in the digital space, to do that and the way people are telling their own and sharing their own stories, it feels like a natural progression of a lot of the things that are most interesting about cinema and being able to watch, for example, a video blog with a certain kind of respect for the story that’s being told, without the hierarchy of “this is not already a proper film,” is really exciting.
HANNAH: I think the interaction between “amateur” and respect is so interesting because lending respect to personal archives and remixed stories opens up what new creators are making. One more question just to wrap things up – I wanted to know what your future plans are for the collective and where you see it going?
JESSE: It’s interesting because in the new space now, with the nature, the physical elements, the openness, character of that space – it’s this old building that’s got 2 floors, and it’s got open space, and it goes all the way down to the coast – it has its own personality. The more that we bring people into that space, the more they’re interested in doing things in that space, and the more that sort of compounds into an identity for the space and ourselves — I feel like that is the moment that we are navigating. Then also a new visibility, and in different other contexts a continuity of this centre of manifested belonging – the story of this dubbing culture, the story of DIY cinema culture, and Dar as Salaam. I’d say that there are lots of threads that are very rich and can be followed up on and explored in different ways. I don’t know if I have a definitive answer in terms of what that will mean, but I would say it’s between the richness of the ideas and Dar es Salaam as an emerging city... Our capacity to find a way to come together and to communicate our interest in these ideas and share them and our audience, and the extended idea where the Ajabu Ajabu family is in a great position.
But at the same time, the urgent questions and the practical questions are also something that require a lot of attention. We’re in a position where we’re balancing that and relying on each other by nature of our working practices. I think we’re probably able to deconstruct and reconstruct in different ways. We’re learning new ways to shapeshift. I would be surprised if it looks exactly like a linear progression but that’s part of what’s interesting. As long as we’re interested in talking to each other then I think there’s a lot more to come. It’s quite a privilege to be able to have a constellation that is that loose and that fluid. I don’t know what other creative formats would be that generous and generative at the same time.
DARRAGH: I think there’s also a larger project around Apostles of Cinema. “Manifested Belonging” is an ongoing, unravelling exploration of the practice that we have been studying through or studied through the first film and continue to work with DJ Black and his work to preserve film, to preserve film culture and preserve the language through film is something that we’re really actively working around right now and developing a feature around.
HANNAH: That’s so exciting to hear. I’m really excited to see that eventually.