The Coast, dir. Sohrab Hura, India 2020, 17 min.
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Elisa Giardina Papa and Valentina Manzoni write:
"Selected in dialogue with Elisa Giardina Papa’s She Flickered In and Out of History, the artists’ films assembled in No Island Is an Elsewhere consider how territories, their histories, and borders are drawn, archived, and ultimately contested.
In Sohrab Hura’s The Coast, the shoreline becomes a threshold rather than a boundary, a point of release where distinctions between land and sea, self and other, temporarily dissolve. Ali Cherri’s Nöbetçi (The Watchman), set on the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, reflects on the politics of border recognition and the violence through which sovereignty and national identity are produced and policed.
Onyeka Igwe and Laura Huertas Millán revisit colonial histories by confronting the very spaces through which practices of ordering and display take shape. Igwe’s a so-called archive examines the afterlives of British colonial film archives across Nigeria and Britain, while Huertas Millán’s Journey to a Land Otherwise Known reworks the languages of colonial exploration and ethnography through the constructed tropical “elsewhere” of a European greenhouse.
Coco Fusco’s Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word returns these questions to the figure of the island. Filmed around Hart Island, New York’s public burial ground, the work unsettles the idea of the island as a space onto which exotic fantasies of reinvention are projected. Here, the island is neither empty nor outside history, but a geography marked by abandonment, death, and mourning.
Together, the films ask us to encounter the island not as an elsewhere to be discovered and conquered, but as a place from which those very gestures might be questioned."
Running order:
Nöbetçi (The Watchman), dir. Ali Cherri, Italy, France 2024, 26 min.
a so-called archive, dir. Onyeka Igwe, Nigeria, United Kingdom 2020, 20 min.
Journey to a Land Otherwise Known, dir. Laura Huertas Millán, Columbia, France 2011, 22 min.
Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word, dir. Coco Fusco, USA 2021, 12 min.
Elisa Giardina Papa research-driven practice seeks forms of knowledge and desire that have been disqualified and rendered nonsensical by hegemonic demands for order and legibility. Sifting through discarded AI training datasets, censored cinema repositories, or factitious colonial accounts, she traces how recurrent forms of extractive capitalism have strained our capacities for living and labouring. Her work has been exhibited at the 59th Venice Biennale, the Whitney Museum, Gropius Bau, ICA London, among others. EGP lives and works in New York and Sant’Ignazio, Sicily, and is a professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
Valentina Manzoni is a filmmaker and film curator whose practice moves between memory, embodiment, and the unstable life of images. Her work traces the ways images are created, reconstructed, and transmitted, moving between intimate experience and collective histories. Trained between Chicago, Cuba, and Milan, she currently lives and works in Italy and Switzerland.
Valentina Manzoni is a filmmaker and film curator whose practice moves between memory, embodiment, and the unstable life of images. Her work traces the ways images are created, reconstructed, and transmitted, moving between intimate experience and collective histories. Trained between Chicago, Cuba, and Milan, she currently lives and works in Italy and Switzerland.
This event is part of the public programme of Elisa Giardina Papa: She Flickered In and Out of History.
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Wed, 02 Sep 2026
Cinema 1
06:30 pm
Wed 2 Sep, 6:30pm
Ticket includes free exhibition entry on the same day.
Ticket information
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Cinema 1
- Both our Cinemas have step free access from The Mall and are accessible by ramp
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Elisa Giardina Papa. Photo: Riccardo Banfi.
Valentina Manzoni. Photo: Fabiola Skraqi.
