“Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters”

Frieda Ekotto, University of Michigan and Marthe Djilo Kamga, film director

Gowen Room, Wilson Commons

 The Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies invites you to our speaker series on Wednesday, February 19, 2020 from 1-3 p.m. in the Gowen Room.

This speaker series event is featuring Frieda Ekotto, professor of Afro-American and African studies, comparative literature, and Francophone studies at the University of Michigan, and Marthe Djilo Kamga, film director, who will discuss “Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters” (2018).

In this documentary, Marthe Djilo Kamga takes us along as she engages in fruitful conversations with four other Cameroonian female artists who, like her, know exile as well as how necessary it is to transmit to younger generations what they have learned as their multiple identities have evolved and fused. The original score that accompanies the voices of these three generations of women is an active part of the adventure, a witness for the future.

A Discussion with My Sisters is the first installment of Frieda Ekotto’s visual research project Vibrancy of Silence: Archiving the Images and Cultural Production of Sub-Saharan African Women on African women as the unsung heroines of artistic and cultural production. Indeed, their immense cultural and creative contributions remain underrepresented and inexplicably invisible. She is resolved to affirm and archive her own story and thus participate in a rereading of the “Colonial Library” with new kinds of narratives by and for women.

Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies and the Morey Lectureship Funds of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures.