Present Present Present. On grounding the Mediateca and Sonotera spaces in Malafo, Guinea-Bissau

Spiral Traversing Assembly

We adopted a strategy that we might call centrifugal: we started [the armed struggle] in the centre and moved towards the periphery of our country.
– Amílcar Cabral1

Over the past decade, working through the digitalization and activation of Guinea-Bissau’s anti-colonial film and audio archive, I have become aware of the implications of the spiral shape of the analogue audio or film reel.2 In the processes of archiving, reproducing and mediating audio-visual material, the spiral mechanics of these medialities offer possibilities for experiencing and performing time as a recurrent cycle (always otherwise), beyond the linear construction of past–present–future. In a linear (or enlightened) conception, time is imagined as a straight, progressive vector where the past is something irreparable, unreachable, prompting action in the present toward a justice to be performed and achieved in the future. What was, will never be. What is ahead is plannable or programmable.

Through ongoing exchanges with my ciné-kin in Guinea-Bissau (Sana na N'Hada, Flora Gomes, Suleimane Biai and others), I have learned that this time-construct is not self-evident:3 The actualizing gestures of these archival practices are materially and epistemologically linked to the spiral. By allowing past events and entities to be inscribed onto the present material world, their material dynamics and potencies echo animistic cosmologies in Guinea-Bissau. Through their archival activation – rather than only representation – events, sounds, people, shadows, light, entities, crossings and emotions are encountered and made present beyond the traces captured on the spiral-wound tape. Volatile narratives are de- and recomposed as temporalities collapse. These layered encounters have the potential to re-pair – that is, to bring together again – what was once separated: to ‘perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken,’ a move towards reconciliation in the present.4

One of our formats for such endeavours was a mobile cinema developed within the frame of the project ‘From Boé to Berlin’ for the Visionary Archive Festival (Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin, 2015). Travelling across Guinea-Bissau and to various sites in Europe with the fragmented digitized Guinean film archive, the project entailed projecting images and sounds from different temporalities with an assembly of agencies, people, places and other forces.5 This laboratory of cinema as assembly played out the layered experience of spiral time: the assembly convened, spellbound by the collective hallucinatory experience of seeing together what is otherwise present.6

The mobile cinema followed a spiral centrifugal movement, echoing Amílcar Cabral’s strategic movement in the armed struggle for the liberation of Guinea-Bissau. We initiated the first screening in the centre of the country, where PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) had established the core base of the armed struggle in the mid-1960s, before taking the images and sounds around the country: Móres, Cacheu, Bissau, Buba, Gabu, Boé, and then further towards Berlin, Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Humbling the Mediateca

I understood that Sana na N'Hada’s sound-editing of the film O Regresso de Amílcar Cabral also served as an archive of music that otherwise might never be listened to again.
– Mû Mbana7

The idea to build the Mediateca evolved just after the premiere of Spell Reel (2017), the film that traces the digitization of the Guinean film and video archive and its many itinerancies. A group of film-makers and cinephiles proposed a gathering to think about anti-colonial archival practices beyond Europe.8 The conversation, held at We Are Born Free! Empowerment Radio in Berlin, focused on how to create spaces for archival laboratories in Guinea and other sites across Africa, where those attending had ties.9 At stake was understanding how the unearthing of anti-colonial archives, their activations, and the reflections and experiences we had gathered might constitute a method for a practice of struggle or a form of archival activism.10

We discussed the case of working with the Guinean audio-visual archive, which had enabled an intense learning curve – from digitization, performative screenings and mobile cinema to discussions and activations, questioning the politics of archival practices. These initiatives, however, were primarily driven or funded by European allies. With the Cairo Cimatheque as a reference, we focused on the urgency of establishing a space for these processes to occur independently in Guinea-Bissau.11 A magical coincidence occurred when Guinean poet and architect Marinho de Pina, unaware of the Guinean archive project, attended the screening of Spell Reel and joined this gathering. From that day on, Marinho was part of the collective imagining of the building of the Mediateca.

What follows outlines quests, dreams, thoughts, politics and multiple other sources that informed the building of the Mediateca. The name ‘Mediateca’ arose from our work with archives, work that mediates not only images and sounds but also other forces, entities, emotions and imaginaries. Mediateca became a shelter for medialities that are, in part, beyond our grasp.12

In the 1950s, Amílcar Cabral, then an agronomist working for the Portuguese authorities, identified three principles for the Pessubé colonial farm, which he led and reshaped into an experimental farming lab in Bissau during colonial rule:

- Flattening hierarchies between farmers, scientists, and the state
- Promoting research and experimentation
- Serving as a hub for the translocal exchange of knowledge

These principles guided our imagining of the Mediateca: a space for horizontal encounters, experimentation and knowledge exchange, based on the militant legacy of Guinea-Bissau’s audio-visual collection. This space was informed by what I have called an ‘agropoetics of liberation’, hinting at Amílcar Cabral’s agronomic work and established in Malafo through Sana na N'Hada’s connection to the community and the land.13

Malafo, situated in the geographic centre of Guinea-Bissau, is a Balanta farming village of Sana’s ancestors. ‘Abotcha’, meaning ‘on the ground, humble, situated, on land, onshore’ in Balanta, became another motto for the Mediateca: how to work from Malafo while being connected to the world and engaged with decisions imposed from afar.

To imagine the Mediateca building with the community, we embarked on a series of workshops.

‘Militant Education’, developed in collaboration with Portuguese historian Sónia Vaz Borges, was a workshop for participants to learn from the militant education system during the Guinean liberation movement, which established approximately 164 schools in liberated zones and neighbouring countries during the war of independence (1963–74). Archival material and oral accounts from witnesses informed this workshop, leading to experimental activations of the legacy of militant education, and discussions on which of its methods were useful for Mediateca.14

‘Mangrove School’ was a speculative exercise, in which people were asked to imagine the living conditions of students and teachers who established jungle schools in Guinea’s mangrove wetlands during the liberation struggle. Based on Marcelino Mutna’s account of a school sheltered in the mangroves in the 1970s, we built a school in the Malafo mangrove and restaged scenes of learning in this rhizomatic environment. The documentation resulted in the film Mangrove School (2020).

‘Traditional Architecture’ was led by Guinean architect Marinho de Pina, who wrote his master’s thesis on traditional building materials, forms and techniques in Guinea-Bissau and now shared his knowledge of environmentally friendly construction. Together with the Malafo community, we built a scale model of the village to test the placement, orientations, shapes and functions of the Mediateca building. This workshop helped develop a collective understanding of the community’s needs and how they might be articulated through the Mediateca.15

The building, made of adobe shaped with mud prepared by termites, rests on a stone foundation, with mahogany wood pillars, palm tree trunks for the roof structure, woven bamboo covered with mud for the ceiling and a zinc roof.16 Thanks to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, from 2022 to 2024 the Mediateca was able to fund sixteen workshops in music (and musical instrument–building), archival practices, cinema, theatre and agroecological activities.17

We often discussed that the Malafo community didn’t necessarily need the gentrification that might come with the Mediateca’s activities. Yet, despite the risks and conflicts, the space has been envisioned as an artificial buffer between the traditional farming community and the inevitable impact of neoliberal forces and forces of capital encroaching on Guinea-Bissau. This might be another function of the Mediateca – the mediation between traditional and capitalist modes of living.18

Stirring the Sonotera

Listening to music is a gesture in which the body tunes into the mathesis universalis. This is possible because acoustic vibrations not only penetrate but also resonate with the body’s skin. The skin, that no-man’s-land between a human being and the world, transforms from boundary to link.
– Vilém Flusser19

To focus on sound is to emphasize its medium – indeed, its media.
– Louis Chude-Sokei20

In the peak of the rainy season, groups of two dozen teenage girls join together to plant rice for their families and community. In one day, with water over the knees, they can plant enough to supply a family’s yearly rice needs. Their singing-while-planting becomes a complex interplay between sounding, splashing and listening. The sonic is activated as part of movement, breathing, bathing, and labour. Singing together synchronizes the forces of the group and of water reverberance in a collective body. One voice launches the first refrain, which is echoed in chorus. In each refrain that follows, always initiated by a different person, a single voice ignites many, activating rhythm, breathing and movement. Words, rhyme and harmony entangle old and new knowledge through a soothing communal process of sonic transmission. Culture and agriculture are intertwined.

The latent presence in the Malafo community of oral traditions and music, and the legacy of the sonoteque in the Guinean archive, initiated in the 1970s by Sana na N'Hada and his comrades, made it clear that the future Mediateca would need to foreground and give space to the sonic. This led to various activities around music: building instruments, singing and dancing workshops, storytelling and listening sessions.

Summoning old and new, the idea of the Sonotera developed as a space that merges a sonoteque (sound archive and studio) with a seed bank (sementera in Creole). The Sonotera will celebrate the entanglement of culture and agriculture by bringing together sounds and seeds – the natural vessels of genetic material whose geopolitical regulation reflects the power dynamics of the archive.

Is there a contradiction between live music-making and the gestures of recording, archiving and playing sound reels or digital files? Technical mediation didn’t begin with wired devices or digital coding. Medialities are intrinsic to music-making and producing socialities, whether through airwaves, resonating mud walls and dirt floors, or the repetition of lyrics and rhythms. Wired or wireless, the transmission of electric signals and of reverberating waves of rhythm, tone and message in a body both involve mineral, metallic and electrical connectors, receivers and transmitters. Here are three reflections on medialities informing the Sonotera:

- Mediality as Technical Continuum: Attending to the sonic, as in the Guinean sonoteque that gathered sounds for unknown, still-to-come uses. This understanding of medialities as a technical continuum, without pre-determined purpose, connects oral/sonic transfers to analogue or digital supports.

- Mediality as Transfer: Multi-instrumentalist and poet Mû Mbana notes how some of Sana na N'Hada’s films serve as carriers and traffickers of sounds that would otherwise never be heard again.

- Mediality as Deep Focus on Sound: In The Sound of Culture (2016), Louis Chude-Sokei argues that focusing on sound itself, beyond rhythm, melody and performance, brings us to the core of mediality.21

Electric music-production technology still entails the performance of tasks of transfer, close to those involved in traditional music practices: transfers between disciple and musician, singer or storyteller. Traditional or contemporary, music-making in Guinea extends beyond entertainment, comprising sonic iterations of spiritual and mental care in the face of suffering – stirring the troubles from the water in a calabash. This underlines the mediality of music and informs the design of the Sonotera at the Mediateca.

Still under construction, the Sonotera will be a space for study, retreat, listening, playing, research and sonic-wave transfer. It will allow for three different meanings of ‘present’ to be practiced:

- Present – the here and now, the collapse of time
- Present – (attending to) what inheres in matter, vibration, inscription and archive
- Present – gift, offerings, intentions, tools to share and seed

The Sonotera is envisioned as a place for halting time and studying (in) geometries of the sonic, echoing Pauline Oliveros’s belief that deep listening is a necessary pause before action: ‘Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting, and deciding on action.’

Listening involves the body, which vibrates in resonance with the material world.22 As Vilém Flusser synthesizes: ‘It is exactly because the gesture [of listening to music] is so profane, so technical, so public … that music is the greatest, most sacred mystery. It does not need to conceal itself, for in its magnificent, supercomplex simplicity, it is obscure … For it is life in death and death in life.’23

Through infinite connection, the self dissolves, and with it, the structures of rational divide – blame, value, choice. There is no selfishness without self, and soothing belonging takes place within the collective, traversed by invisible matter, vibrating bodies and the vital force of plant seeds – the most ancestral form of archive and life-mediality. The Sonotera celebrates the sonic seeding practices of spiral recurrences, offering the present to be present in the present.24