February 24, 2023
Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago
"The Root & The Bloom: Where Could We Go—A Map of Finding Home"
A film screening with artists and filmmakers Echaka Agba and Kristina Valada-Viars followed by a conversation with CMS faculty and DoVA alumni, Marco Ferrari.
The two films by Echaka Agba and Kristina Valada-Viars seek and dream a home that prioritizes Black and Queer Liberation. The Root: Looking for Ancestors in My Father’s Garden (Coordinate 1) is a meditation on family meant to begin ongoing conversations outside of the details of daily life. Agba and Valada-Viars, partners in life and creativity, travel from their home in Chicago to Agba’s family home for a series of conversations around the concept of home with the elder members of their family now living in the American Midwest. Seeking information about relatives she never met, in a series of family gatherings and formal conversations in the summer of 2020, Echaka asks the adults who raised her about memories, values, and challenges in their path from Nigeria to the home they have built in rural Indiana. Part road trip and part experimental personal narrative, The Bloom (Coordinate 2) invites the audience to explore the meaning of home alongside the filmmakers and their family. (2020-21, USA, 40 min., digital video)
Presented by the Film Studies Center with support from the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts