Output details

Port Harcourt: Garden City

The main focus of the video pieces that constitute this submission is the informal waterside settlements that fringe Port Harcourt, home to 480,000 dwellers. In this project I set out to produce a series of films to be screened in the slum communities in which they were shot and to be used simultaneously in Amnesty International and Witness campaigns.

The series is a component of an avowedly activist practice-as-research in which both filming and screening in Port Harcourt’s slums are a means of investigating and increasing the capacity of these communities to mobilise. The practice develops an approach to filmmaking as political intervention predicated on an iterative and participatory process of production and projection. My films were screened to participants who became critical spectators of their own image and in turn actors and directors of future productions. Footage from these later phases was, in turn, screened back to them. The central research question at the heart of this process was how might these films inform the ways in which their subjects see themselves and imagine their futures? The resources for self-representation embedded within the project, as well as the spaces of debate they create, develop the capacity of residents to wrest control of how their settlements are represented and how their city is planned.

In this connection the project deployed participatory media production to connect grassroots advocacy and planning efforts with international campaign networks and urban environment multilaterals, such as Amnesty International and UN-HABITAT. The collaborative process of production and the social spaces of exhibition, then, are at once objects and instruments of research: process and product together constitute these outputs. Film work and how film is put to work, the social labour of film production and the social event of its exhibition are central to the research.