For a few brief years in the late 1970s and early 1980s Mozambique was a key site on the global m... more For a few brief years in the late 1970s and early 1980s Mozambique was a key site on the global map of revolutionary cinema. It was a site where various experiments were carried out into how film might act as an agent of radical social change. Cinema was to be part of an ...
Within the context of cinematographic traditions and different liberation movements on the Africa... more Within the context of cinematographic traditions and different liberation movements on the African continent, Ros Gray’s research focuses on revolutionary cinema and its global networks; the screen as a site of radical gathering; anti-colonial and post-colonial theory; and contemporary film and video art
Ros Gray presents Abderrahmane Sissako’s Octobre (1993) and Rostov Luanda(1998), drawing on her r... more Ros Gray presents Abderrahmane Sissako’s Octobre (1993) and Rostov Luanda(1998), drawing on her recent chapter, 'Haven’t you heard of internationalism? The Socialist Friendships of Mozambican Cinema' from Lars Kristensen’s book Post Communist Film – Russia, Eastern Europe and World Culture, Routledge, 2012. Gray’s paper and research explores the ‘affective communities’ formed as a result of Soviet support during the Mozambican independence movement and the educational and cultural initiatives that followed the liberation in 1975. Followed by a conversation with Mark Nash.
In one of the first cultural acts to follow independence in 1975, Frelimo's new Marxist-Lenin... more In one of the first cultural acts to follow independence in 1975, Frelimo's new Marxist-Leninist government of Mozambique set up a National Institute of Cinema (the INC). In a country where many people had no previous experience of cinema, the INC was tasked to "deliver to the people an image of the people". This book explores how this unique culture of revolutionary filmmaking began during the armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Following independence, the INC began the task of decolonising the film industry, building on networks of solidarity with other socialist and non-aligned struggles. Mozambique became an epicentre for militant filmmakers from around the world and played an essential role in building the new nation. Crucially, the book examines how filmmaking became a resource for resistance against Apartheid as the Cold War played out across Southern Africa during the late 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on detailed film analysis, production histories and t...
Edited French translation of Gray, Ros and Sheikh, Shela. 2018. Editor's Introduction: The Wr... more Edited French translation of Gray, Ros and Sheikh, Shela. 2018. Editor's Introduction: The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions. Third Text, 32(2-3), pp. 163-175. ISSN 0952-8822
The Wretched Earth Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions Guest Editors: Ros Gray and She... more The Wretched Earth Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions Guest Editors: Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh Third Text, Volume 32, issues 2–3 (2018) This special issue presents new research on, and in some cases generated through, contemporary art practices that both explore and intervene in the cultures, politics and systems of representation, as well as their attendant desires and violences, generated through human interaction with the soil. Our proposition is that, in order to do full justice to Fanon’s diagnosis of ‘the wretched of the earth’, we must understand more deeply the extent to which this is due to the fact that the earth itself is wretched, and that part of this condition has been the destruction of ‘ecological’ relations with the earth. The phrase ‘the wretched earth’ signals our ongoing engagement with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist writers such as Fanon, but also the need to go beyond their reconfigured humanism to think about the multiple human and nonhuman cohabitations that constitute the soil and, more broadly, our more-than-human commons. Full issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ctte20/current Introduction:
In this thesis, the theoretical implications of the African Revolution for the entanglements of p... more In this thesis, the theoretical implications of the African Revolution for the entanglements of postcolonial urban space are explored through examination of radical cinematic inventions. It tracks points where the cinema screen became a site of radical gathering and ambitions of cinema emerged that expressed a revolutionary desire. The thesis maps out a relational geography between different late liberation struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, a relational geography that is produced by cinema in the networks of connections lived out and constructed through radical drives. The exploration of aesthetics of liberation is the point of departure to investigate how screens, as urban surfaces of projection and reflection, appearance and masking, emerge from the world and have material and psychical effects in the world. In the entanglements of cinema with radical politics, the memory of Revolution, after the event, re-emerges in unexpected forms and figures, which prompt a re-thinking of the ...
for the cultivation of crops—in other words, a site of productivity or financial return—Bellacasa... more for the cultivation of crops—in other words, a site of productivity or financial return—Bellacasa asks us to engage with soil as a living, interdependent community and with forms of soil ecology that feature alternative human-soil relations and what she calls a “care time.” In her attention to practices that have been marginalized by “successful” forms of technoscientific innovation, Bellacasa takes resource from not only ecological but also feminist approaches. Our proposition is that we can add to this postcolonial approaches, which, although not explicitly articulated by Bellacasa, resonate with much of what she offers. We claim that it is only by combining these three approaches that we can, as she puts it, catch “glimpses of alternative, liveable relationalities”—relationalities that can “hopefully [contribute] to other possible worlds in the making.”
For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh will introduce how planting was ce... more For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh will introduce how planting was central to colonialism and explain why it is vital that we recognise the ongoing effects of colonial botany and the plantation system. They will discuss how gardens – from botanical collections to municipal parks – are historical sites of exclusion and labour as well as leisure and enjoyment, detailing the hierarchies that exist within these spaces, and describing how artists have actively sought to decolonise these spaces through planting with reference to ongoing projects in London.
For a few brief years in the late 1970s and early 1980s Mozambique was a key site on the global m... more For a few brief years in the late 1970s and early 1980s Mozambique was a key site on the global map of revolutionary cinema. It was a site where various experiments were carried out into how film might act as an agent of radical social change. Cinema was to be part of an ...
Within the context of cinematographic traditions and different liberation movements on the Africa... more Within the context of cinematographic traditions and different liberation movements on the African continent, Ros Gray’s research focuses on revolutionary cinema and its global networks; the screen as a site of radical gathering; anti-colonial and post-colonial theory; and contemporary film and video art
Ros Gray presents Abderrahmane Sissako’s Octobre (1993) and Rostov Luanda(1998), drawing on her r... more Ros Gray presents Abderrahmane Sissako’s Octobre (1993) and Rostov Luanda(1998), drawing on her recent chapter, 'Haven’t you heard of internationalism? The Socialist Friendships of Mozambican Cinema' from Lars Kristensen’s book Post Communist Film – Russia, Eastern Europe and World Culture, Routledge, 2012. Gray’s paper and research explores the ‘affective communities’ formed as a result of Soviet support during the Mozambican independence movement and the educational and cultural initiatives that followed the liberation in 1975. Followed by a conversation with Mark Nash.
In one of the first cultural acts to follow independence in 1975, Frelimo's new Marxist-Lenin... more In one of the first cultural acts to follow independence in 1975, Frelimo's new Marxist-Leninist government of Mozambique set up a National Institute of Cinema (the INC). In a country where many people had no previous experience of cinema, the INC was tasked to "deliver to the people an image of the people". This book explores how this unique culture of revolutionary filmmaking began during the armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Following independence, the INC began the task of decolonising the film industry, building on networks of solidarity with other socialist and non-aligned struggles. Mozambique became an epicentre for militant filmmakers from around the world and played an essential role in building the new nation. Crucially, the book examines how filmmaking became a resource for resistance against Apartheid as the Cold War played out across Southern Africa during the late 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on detailed film analysis, production histories and t...
Edited French translation of Gray, Ros and Sheikh, Shela. 2018. Editor's Introduction: The Wr... more Edited French translation of Gray, Ros and Sheikh, Shela. 2018. Editor's Introduction: The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions. Third Text, 32(2-3), pp. 163-175. ISSN 0952-8822
The Wretched Earth Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions Guest Editors: Ros Gray and She... more The Wretched Earth Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions Guest Editors: Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh Third Text, Volume 32, issues 2–3 (2018) This special issue presents new research on, and in some cases generated through, contemporary art practices that both explore and intervene in the cultures, politics and systems of representation, as well as their attendant desires and violences, generated through human interaction with the soil. Our proposition is that, in order to do full justice to Fanon’s diagnosis of ‘the wretched of the earth’, we must understand more deeply the extent to which this is due to the fact that the earth itself is wretched, and that part of this condition has been the destruction of ‘ecological’ relations with the earth. The phrase ‘the wretched earth’ signals our ongoing engagement with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist writers such as Fanon, but also the need to go beyond their reconfigured humanism to think about the multiple human and nonhuman cohabitations that constitute the soil and, more broadly, our more-than-human commons. Full issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ctte20/current Introduction:
In this thesis, the theoretical implications of the African Revolution for the entanglements of p... more In this thesis, the theoretical implications of the African Revolution for the entanglements of postcolonial urban space are explored through examination of radical cinematic inventions. It tracks points where the cinema screen became a site of radical gathering and ambitions of cinema emerged that expressed a revolutionary desire. The thesis maps out a relational geography between different late liberation struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, a relational geography that is produced by cinema in the networks of connections lived out and constructed through radical drives. The exploration of aesthetics of liberation is the point of departure to investigate how screens, as urban surfaces of projection and reflection, appearance and masking, emerge from the world and have material and psychical effects in the world. In the entanglements of cinema with radical politics, the memory of Revolution, after the event, re-emerges in unexpected forms and figures, which prompt a re-thinking of the ...
for the cultivation of crops—in other words, a site of productivity or financial return—Bellacasa... more for the cultivation of crops—in other words, a site of productivity or financial return—Bellacasa asks us to engage with soil as a living, interdependent community and with forms of soil ecology that feature alternative human-soil relations and what she calls a “care time.” In her attention to practices that have been marginalized by “successful” forms of technoscientific innovation, Bellacasa takes resource from not only ecological but also feminist approaches. Our proposition is that we can add to this postcolonial approaches, which, although not explicitly articulated by Bellacasa, resonate with much of what she offers. We claim that it is only by combining these three approaches that we can, as she puts it, catch “glimpses of alternative, liveable relationalities”—relationalities that can “hopefully [contribute] to other possible worlds in the making.”
For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh will introduce how planting was ce... more For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh will introduce how planting was central to colonialism and explain why it is vital that we recognise the ongoing effects of colonial botany and the plantation system. They will discuss how gardens – from botanical collections to municipal parks – are historical sites of exclusion and labour as well as leisure and enjoyment, detailing the hierarchies that exist within these spaces, and describing how artists have actively sought to decolonise these spaces through planting with reference to ongoing projects in London.
FUGITIVE REMAINS: SOIL, CELLULOID AND RESISTANT COLLECTIVITIES
FILIPA CÉSAR, ROS GRAY, RAPHAËL GR... more FUGITIVE REMAINS: SOIL, CELLULOID AND RESISTANT COLLECTIVITIES FILIPA CÉSAR, ROS GRAY, RAPHAËL GRISEY, SHELA SHEIKH, BOUBA TOURÉ, NICOLE WOLF SATURDAY 22 OCTOBER, 12.00PM – 4.00PM In this roundtable seminar we shift our gaze from the infrastructures and cultural imaginaries enacted by British colonialism to broader relations between colonialism, cultivation (cultural and agricultural) and representation across the colonised world, and their lasting legacies in the neo-colonial relations of contemporary neoliberal globalization. In reference to colonial agricultural industries, we turn specifically to the soil, both literally and in the collective imaginary, as the site of exploitation and of resistance. We will consider soil in the context of historical anti-colonial struggles and moments of decolonisation, contemporary alter-globalization and anti-capitalist formations (such as ecological movements and agricultural cooperatives), and the promise of future collectivities. We are interested in the practices of representation, above all (but not limited to) ecologies of the moving image, and the role of aesthetics—both historically and currently—within ‘fugitive’ practices. The panel of artists, activists and theorists will explore the connective tissues between soil and celluloid, in both their materiality and metaphoricity, and the importance of the soil to what we might call ‘cine-geographies’. Questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to: How to ‘activate’ or ‘re-wild’ the fragilities and potentialities of colonial remains—be these scarred landscapes or dissonant archival film material—for our present moment? Between soil, celluloid and political struggle, what assemblages might be (re-)animated? What forms of non-hierarchical human/non-human community and collectivity might these give rise to? How can film-making practices align with those of permaculture in the creation of ecosystems and networks, and in the roles assigned to marginal plants/images? From the plundering accumulation of colonialism to the primitive accumulation of capital, what might be alternative economies and relations to the soil and the image? What are the political ecologies of the audio-visual, and how might this relate to contemporary ideas of the ‘commons’ and/or ‘undercommons’? What nascent ecologies of knowledge—derived from local and ‘minor’ practices, submerged histories and memories of the land and soil—can be unearthed?
For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh will introduce how planting was ce... more For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh will introduce how planting was central to colonialism and explain why it is vital that we recognise the ongoing effects of colonial botany and the plantation system. They will discuss how gardens – from botanical collections to municipal parks – are historical sites of exclusion and labour as well as leisure and enjoyment, detailing the hierarchies that exist within these spaces, and describing how artists have actively sought to decolonise these spaces through planting with reference to ongoing projects in London.
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Papers by Ros Gray
FILIPA CÉSAR, ROS GRAY, RAPHAËL GRISEY, SHELA SHEIKH, BOUBA TOURÉ, NICOLE WOLF
SATURDAY 22 OCTOBER, 12.00PM – 4.00PM
In this roundtable seminar we shift our gaze from the infrastructures and cultural imaginaries enacted by British colonialism to broader relations between colonialism, cultivation (cultural and agricultural) and representation across the colonised world, and their lasting legacies in the neo-colonial relations of contemporary neoliberal globalization. In reference to colonial agricultural industries, we turn specifically to the soil, both literally and in the collective imaginary, as the site of exploitation and of resistance. We will consider soil in the context of historical anti-colonial struggles and moments of decolonisation, contemporary alter-globalization and anti-capitalist formations (such as ecological movements and agricultural cooperatives), and the promise of future collectivities. We are interested in the practices of representation, above all (but not limited to) ecologies of the moving image, and the role of aesthetics—both historically and currently—within ‘fugitive’ practices.
The panel of artists, activists and theorists will explore the connective tissues between soil and celluloid, in both their materiality and metaphoricity, and the importance of the soil to what we might call ‘cine-geographies’. Questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to: How to ‘activate’ or ‘re-wild’ the fragilities and potentialities of colonial remains—be these scarred landscapes or dissonant archival film material—for our present moment? Between soil, celluloid and political struggle, what assemblages might be (re-)animated? What forms of non-hierarchical human/non-human community and collectivity might these give rise to? How can film-making practices align with those of permaculture in the creation of ecosystems and networks, and in the roles assigned to marginal plants/images? From the plundering accumulation of colonialism to the primitive accumulation of capital, what might be alternative economies and relations to the soil and the image? What are the political ecologies of the audio-visual, and how might this relate to contemporary ideas of the ‘commons’ and/or ‘undercommons’? What nascent ecologies of knowledge—derived from local and ‘minor’ practices, submerged histories and memories of the land and soil—can be unearthed?
https://www.botanicalmind.online/podcasts/the-coloniality-of-planting