SNAPSHOTS OF LAGOS

Medium: HD Digital video, colour, B&W & sound. Digital file conversion from 8mm, DV tape; archival footage.
Country: UK, Portugal
Year: 2021 - present

“In a Portuguese coastal town tangibly haunted by the afterlife of slavery, a documentary filmmaker searches for the remnants of a rumoured mass grave from the 15th century, forgotten by tourists and residents. A poetic meditation which combines the methodologies of documentary and fiction, Snapshots of Lagos uses the microcosm of a small town to open up a broader interrogation of the violent mechanics of erasure at the heart of nationalist revitalisation projects.

Snapshots is set in Lagos, a touristic town on the Algarve to which many historians trace the roots of the Atlantic slave trade. As the narrator ambles through the town, she stumbles upon a constellation of three architectural sites: a statue, a museum, and finally a mass grave, which was excavated accidentally in 2009 and subsequently re-buried beneath the concrete ruin of a multi-storey car park. Below, the bodies of the former enslaved still lie unmemorialised, denied a proper burial. Though at first seemingly unrelated, the sites gradually begin to resonate with one another, as the narrator uncovers residues of the unsettling histories buried in their depths.”

Fragment 2, ‘Snapshots of Lagos’, 2022.

Mapping Imaginaries: Site III, The Cemetery. Pencil and ink on paper, digital overlay (2021)

Mapping Imaginaries: Site Index. Pencil and ink on paper, digital overlay (2021)

Documentation from screening of ‘Vale da Gafaria (Leprosarium Valley)’, Whirled Cinema Brixton, 2022.