Digital Poetics #15 x F(r)ictions: scripted for a wayward narrative by Samra Mayanja

Presenting our first of four collaborations with screening space and video art platform F(r)ictions. This screening was held from August to December 2020.

Borrowing from Saidiya Hartman’s process of 'critical fabulation' (2008), 'scripted for a wayward narrator' constructs slow fictional narratives about two members of the artist's family and their cyclical road to death and exile. The film is a collision of audio-visual materials drawn from the artists collection of online archives, Ugandan cinema and images circulating through WhatsApp.

— Feel free to contact the artist at samramayanja@gmail.com if this film brings up anything for you.

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Samra Mayanja is an artist, with poetics at the centre of her processes. Mayanja predominantly make performances and films as well as writing. Her films are an effort to acknowledge, collect and archive accessible, decentralised and dislocated images of black people and their environments - in an effort to commune disparate voices. Mayanja’s performance practise explores how to generate collectively around and beyond what’s unconceived, lost, discarded, destroyed or arrives in tatters. The artist regularly holds space for contemplation and the creation of experimental reflexive processes with/for others. Which sometimes looks like movement work and other times looks like the creation of sound. Her desire is to twirl consciousness raising around neon bible/justice/morality projection/diktat/onesided secrets.

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F(r)ictions is a screening space for experimental film and video work, making room for imperfections, unfinished work, left-field pieces, and diy work. The screening series is a space for feminist film, putting an emphasis on work by queer and trans people of colour.

F(r)ictions is invested in the risks audio-visual works take: film can play on time and create abstractions in ways that hint at multiple possibilities/differences/contexts and provoke curiosity and questioning. At its best, film builds networks of escape and paints out new worlds and imaginations. frictions.net

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This publication is in Copyright. Samra Mayanja, 2020.

The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.