GLORIA OYARZABAL
Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana – a democracy in fatigue

Memory, violence, postmodern metropolis, earthquakes, pseudo-democracy, war, knowledge making, imaginary, stereotypes.

The danger of the single story.

Is the concept of democracy universal?

Pasolini in his pseudo-documentary Appunti per un’Orestiade Africana (1970) radicalizes an aesthetic of the unfinished, generating a political essay on the invention of freedom and a reflection on the post-colonial condition of the newly independent African countries.

But Pasolini knows his vision is paternalistic and ethnocentric: a sequence is integrated into the film, with the debate organised at the University of Rome between the filmmaker and a group of African students. In the form of a “shared anthropology”, the students strongly criticise the preconceived ideas of the white man that are highlighted in the work sequences viewed.

Aeschylus’ Orestiade – which describes a cycle of deaths and family vendettas, brought to an end by the arrival of the conciliatory justice of Pallas Athena, thus ideally creating the first democratic tribunal in history- is performed in Gibellina in the magical, dreamlike Cretto di Burri, a place that commemorates and materialises trauma and pain, the violence exercised against the land, the people.

BIO

Gloria Oyarzabal (London, 1971) is a Spanish artist photographer with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (UCM). Programmer and co-founder of the independent cinema “La Enana Marrón” in Madrid. She lived three years in Bamako (Mali) researching on the construction of the Idea of Africa, imaginaries and stereotypes; processes of colonization/decolonization and African Feminisms. Her work has been shown around the world: at Fotofestiwal Lodz, Lagos Photo, FORMAT, Athens Photo, PHE PhotoEspaña, Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Bitume Festival Lecce, Encontros da Imagem Braga, Odessa Photo Days, Organ Vida, Kaunas Foto, among others. Some of her selected awards: Landskrona Foto Dummy Award 2017, Encontros Da Imagem Discovery Award 2018, Meitar Award for Excellence in Photography 2019, Photo Israel, Fotofestiwal Grand Prix 2019, Photomed 2019, Images Vevey, Photobook Dummy Award 2019, Aperture Paris Photo Best Photobook of the Year 2020, Fotografía Europea 2022, Prix Elysée 2022-23 nominee, FOAM Paul Huff Award 2023 nominee.