2024
Routes of Rebellion
Premiere:
Nuku Studio
Experimental fiction-non-fiction
On the eve of an unnamed revolution, a writer, a revolutionary, and a dancer contemplate their collective past and future. The short film interweaves fiction, memory, philosophy, and drama, through a bricolage of sampled text and theatrics. Stories of military seizure are counterposed with subjects who grapple with the legacies of violence but still dream of a better world.
Revolutionaries can be saviors, villains, or both; and so may be the citizens who copy them. Texts are drawn from Jerry John Rawlings’s television speech announcing the military takeover in Accra on December 31, 1981; Chinua Achebe, Man of the People, 1966; Mohammed Ben Abdallah, The Trial of Malam Ilya, 1987.
Screenplay written with Mohammed Ben Abdallah;
acting Mohammed Ben Abdallah and Ebi Bright;
dance and choreography Faustina Amankwah;
music Gerald Eze.
“Shipley is a storyteller for our times,” says Nuku Studio Director Nii Obodai who conceived of the show. “He is not above the story but inside it and speaks from experience. He builds his work through deep relationships with people and places, and in the process, his subjects become co-creators of the narratives. Part of Shipley’s skill and ‘privilege’ as an outsider to Ghana is that he forges connections and accesses a breadth of stories that many of us cannot easily retrieve. He brings out our history, our politics, and our arts in ways that few of us have been able to tap into. Isn’t that the job of the artist as researcher? To take what we can’t see and bring it into the physical realm,” says Obodai. “It is a great honor for Nuku to bring these stories of revolutionaries and movements into one interconnected space. We hope that students and artists in Ghana and around the world can see this exhibition as another starting point for inspiring broad and deep investigations.”
Nuku Studio
Film showcased in this Exhibition
