“We Need New Names”
Auto-ethnographic expressions are as “instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways which engage with the colonizer’s own terms. If ethnographic texts are a means in which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, auto-ethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations.” (Munoz 1999, p.81)
It is ‘an effort to reclaim the past and put it in a different relationship with the present’, in this vein, We Need New Names connects personal experience and personal narrative to wider cultural political and social meanings (Munoz 1999, p.85).
It is ‘not interested in searching for some lost and essential experience, because it understands the relationship that subjects have with their own pasts as complicated yet necessary fictions (Munoz 1999, p.82) We Need New Names uses personal archive materials to create a “necessary fiction” that explores the complexities of ancestral histories.
We Need New Names is a non-fiction film examining contemporary Nigerian diasporic identity through contradictions inherent to an ethnographic reading of the funeral of the filmmakers’ family matriarch. Using the personal archive of my grandmother’s funeral DVD to explore the concepts of identity, Diaspora, cultural memory and most importantly ‘fiction’ that I have been trying to settle into an essay video work. How can we as artists challenge the western simplification and belittling of black history through auto-ethnographic practices and new media? I have been exploring this question through my work, We Need New Names.
Biography
Onyeka Igwe is an artist filmmaker from London, currently living and working in Toronto. She studied at Goldsmiths College for a Masters in non-fiction filmmaking. She came to documentary from a radical political activist experience, hoping to develop filmmaking practice as a way of doing politics. Onyeka’s work has been screened in festivals and galleries across the UK and Europe. She has been involved in the organisation and running of the LimaZulu gallery and project space since 2011.
