Film as dialogue: Director Marthe Djilo Kamga and four other Cameroonian female artists discuss their views on cultural heritage, historical memory and how images shape personal and collective memories. The documentary is the first instalment of Frieda Ekotto’s visual research project Vibrancy of Silence: Archiving the Images and Cultural Production of Sub-Saharan African Women. Ekotto focuses on African women, whose cultural and artistic contributions remain underrepresented and invisible. The project aims to affirm and archive their stories and thus participate in a rereading of the »Colonial Library« with new kinds of narratives by and for women.

»Today my condition as a black woman with multiple identities leads me to the need to create and convey myself as I make my way through multiple norms. Many imposed narratives, whether I willingly put up with them or not, both here and there, confront me. Thus it has become vital that I have this conversation with myself. To reinterrogate my own stories, those I have inherited, those I construct today, those I wish to pass on, is a step that has naturally led me to need to confer with other women, some older, some younger, and my peers.
My questioning is indirect, organized around the construction and recognition of multiple, familiar identities: geographic origin, skin color, social milieu, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, etc. These issues are similar to those that concern my co-author, Frieda Ekotto. This is how our approach, which combines production, artistic creation and the archiving of our individual and collective histories, was born.«
– Marthe Djilo Kamga