Taken at face value, Cameroonian artist Ethel Tawe’s work might appear simply as a restoration of family photographs in varying degrees of decay. But while preservation is the architecture behind her work, that’s not simply what it is about. Inventive, boundary-pushing, and in constant questioning of traditional methods of transmitting, Tawe’s work “Image Frequency Modulation” or “IFM” seeks to answer questions about images as sound.
What can we hear when we look at images? What does memory, encoded in a faded print and taken on an old candid camera, sound like?
These questions and more are amply explored through different ways in her work. It is what she is developing even further, with a support grant from being a part of the 2024 Black Public Media Plus cohort. Black Public Media has, for over 30 years, worked with and supported independent filmmakers to create and disseminate visual works that speak to the global Black experience. This week, the organization will be showcasing the works from the cohort at the Maker's Brunch at Torrents.
Tawe, who describes herself as an antidisciplinary artist and works as a researcher, writer and image-maker, began working on “IFM” during the pandemic. “I was home and so naturally, my surroundings were what I was [building] off of,” she says.
The project, which started to take shape during conversations with Tawe's father — a translator and former radio host and lecturer — places him and his relationship with sound at the center of the work. “I was with my dad, so this project [became] about his photographic archive and my reading of it — backward in time to what he transmitted to me, but also carrying that forward into something that I can continue to transmit to others, both of my lineage and beyond.”
Ethel Tawe’s Image Modulation Frequency Installation (2021 - Ongoing)
Photo by Dirk Rose / PACT Zollverein.
Like Tawe, history sits at the center of British Ghanaian artist and filmmaker Baff Akoto’s project. In the ongoing film project, Collateral Echoes, which he is working on alongside producer Lidz-Ama Appiah, the experiences of African-descended people, going back to the ‘70s, are front and center.
Akoto says the project tackles the post-Windrush generation which introduced a critical mass of Black folks who settled in Britain.Exploring the past
In Collateral Echoes the past is still very present. The work seeks to reemphasize how oppression has managed to persist, reinventing itself but bearing the same DNA. “Right now, the Gen Z are looking at the Chris Kaba trial which just concluded with a not guilty verdict and these things, they flow, but they remain consistent in British society and I guess the structural nature of these disparities is something that is I say unavoidable,” Akoto tells OkayAfrica.
For Akoto, cinema was his first entry point into art making. The expansive medium which allows for a range of expressions and thematic experiments gives the filmmaker, who has exhibited at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art and the Berlin Biennale 2016, a chamber for unbridled exploration.
In Baff Akoto’s ‘Collateral Echoes,’ the past is still very present. The work seeks to reemphasize how oppression has managed to persist, reinventing itself but bearing the same DNA.
Photo by Adama Jalloh.
“The thing I recognized about film is that it allows for several things to come together, to synthesize a piece of work,” Akoto says. “From script writing, adaptation like literature to performance to photography, cinematography, compositional framing, all the references that every cinematographer you've ever met has from Venetian paintings and lighting, all the way through to music composition and the score, classical music, effect cinema. So yeah, cinema and film have given me everything as an artist.”
Towards the future
For Tawe, the experience of being a part of the BPM boot camp expanded the scale of her project. “It opened up my mind to how this is resonating with people around me and a chance to make the work more accessible. One of the big parts of that grant will be developing accessible ways to enter the work online.”
Ethel Tawe hopes that her project will take various forms and might be an avenue for other historical explorations through sound and restored images.
Photo courtesy of Ethel Tawe.
On Akoto’s part, being a part of the cohort and presenting a work that highlights Pan-Africanism has been a rewarding experience. “I commend BPM in their work and appreciate the opportunity to kind of have that conversation internationally in a Pan-African context in a way that I didn't necessarily anticipate when I started working on this piece,” he says.
Akoto is trying not to think about how the film project, once completed, will be received. “I don't think about that. I think it's more about just being true to what I'm trying to do [and that] the people I'm working with and the memories of those who will be represented are invoked in the work,” he says. “My focus is just on that. I mean you birth something into the world and then people take it how they take it. But the integrity in the making is the focus always.”
Tawe hopes that her project will take various forms and might be an avenue for other historical explorations through sound and restored images. “I am not trying to confine these stories or these images into one thing — all I have to do is be a custodian and let them move because they are living,” Tawe says. “And so they can never be complete. The same way I've inherited these photographs, someone else will inherit what I leave behind. So there's this concept of time that ties everything together. There's this fantasy of completeness that doesn't exist [and that’s a fact] I'm trying to embrace in the work.”
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