A Letter (Side B) looks at the affective impact of history, immigration and geographical separation on two brothers living in Britain and Ghana. The film collapses time, exploring how the past interrupts and impacts in the present and incorporates recent footage filmed by Achiampong in Ghana as well as archival footage from The Museum of African Art: The Veda and Dr Zdravko Pečar Collection in Belgrade, Serbia.

Speaking from a deeply personal perspective, the film additionally utilises older technologies from a 'hacked' Game Boy Camera, which Achiampong modified to enable the capture of moving images via HDMI. Through the marriage of storytelling and the use of retro technology, the exploration of time travel and the concept of ‘Sanko-time’ becomes possible. Coined by Larry in 2017, the term relates to the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol and indigenous Akan term ‘Sankofa’, meaning to ‘go back and retrieve’.

Through the nuanced uses of current and older technologies, visuals, sound and recollections of lived experiences and conversations, the film also points to the wider social and political consequences of institutional structures and behaviours that threaten the lives of migrants and refugee families.

Through the prism of cinema, the work traces the dangerous journeys of undocumented migrants across vast lands, exploring distance as a condition of diasporic lives just as it is a position intrinsic to the act of filming. The artist invited a crew from the cinema industry of his native Lahore—also known as Lollywood—to script and direct a series of sequences, the narrative of which would be loosely based on videos found online. Recorded by migrants as they travel from South Asia to Europe, such videos give insight into the harshness of their peregrinations––which often last for years and sometimes do not reach the intended destination––as well as offering practical pieces of advice to those who have yet to depart. The artist edited the remade footage into poetic sequences where, however, only the conditions of their assembly are visible. Screenshots of the original videos appear occasionally on the script sheets, while excerpts are played on the crew members’ phones. Rather than attempting to represent the migrants’ experiences, the artist evokes them through the exhaustion of the crew under the scorching sun, the difficulties faced by the cameramen in locating the actors lost in the barren landscape, and the exaggerated gestures of the directors as they coordinate the filming from afar. The work was conceived in spatial and symbolic dialogue with the church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti: the dramatically foreshortened framing is inspired by that of the altarpieces surrounding the installation, and the day-to-night unfolding of the film reverberates with that of the church . Entirely created in a recording studio, the soundscape amplifies the divergence between what we see and what we hear, between the near and the far. It is an integral part of an investigation that looks for moments of truth in the mise-en-scène, for facts within fiction. The work considers the landscape thematically, as a physical and existential space through which to navigate in search of salvation, while underlining the distance between the image as testimony and the image as product, between those who experience dislocation and those who are spectators to it.

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film with additional support from the Mondriaan Fund for the exhibition Nebula 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film

In 1961, 14 years after India gained independence from Britain, the Indian Armed Forces defeated the last remaining Portuguese colonizers in the newly formed state of Goa. My father was 18 at the time, and had just moved away from his small village of Curchorem to Bombay for school when news reached him about his home—now free from the oppression of a foreign hand after 450 years of colonial rule. After spending years thinking about questions of identity, liberation, and the movement of people across space and time, I find myself returning to this period in search of moments of anti-colonial solidarity across continents. My research took me from the shores of Goa, to Indonesia, Mozambique, and Angola, finding brief links between nascent liberation movements and my father’s biography.

Combining 16mm footage with drone videography, montages from the "Parallel cinema" movement in India, desktop screengrabs, and Skype interviews with my father, the resulting film utilizes various methods and modes of seeing at a distance to question the construction of artifice, memory, and identity through the moving image.

Larry Achiampong's projects employ film, still imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance, objects, sound and game design to explore ideas surrounding class, gender, cross-cultural and digital identity. With works that examine his communal and personal heritage – in particular, the intersection between popular culture and the residues of colonisation, Achiampong crate-digs the vaults of history. These investigations examine constructions of ‘the self’ through the activity of splicing the audible and visual materials of personal and interpersonal archives, offering multiple perspectives that reveal the deeply entrenched inequalities in contemporary society.

Basir Mahmood is a filmmaker and visual artist. He studied in Lahore at Beaconhouse National University and launched his career with a year-long fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. He went on to participate in residencies in five different countries, including a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam. Mahmood uses video, film and photography to explore embedded social and historical terrains of the ordinary. His works has been shown at galleries and exhibitions around the globe, bringing him international acclaim and at least eight grants and awards.

Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. Sanzgiri’s films offer sonic and visual journeys through family history, local mythology, and colonial legacies of extraction in Goa, India—where his family originates—deftly utilizing and vividly blending together 3D renderings, drone videography, photogrammetry and lidar scanning, 16 mm film and animation, archival footage, and desktop documentary practices.