Liberatory Ecologies

Director: Iyabo Kwayana

1h 10m, NR

2pm Meet the Director reception | 2:30pm Film screening followed by Q&A

This screening unfolds through five interrelated works: Practice, Liberation, By Water, and Old Man River. Each piece is grounded in a distinct lesson inherited from my mother and father, articulated through fragmented images, elemental sound, and spatial composition. These works are shaped by a fractal and elemental architecture (both literal and imagined) and by a worldbuilding practice that extends beyond image and sound into environmental design and ephemeral objects.

Together, the four works form a portal rather than a single viewing experience. The installation must be entered, listened to, and moved through. It resists passive spectatorship; this is not a film to be watched from a distance. Images arrive in fragments. Sound does not always explain itself. Breath, water, footsteps, and echoes circulate through the space in binaural audio, creating an intimacy that is felt before it is understood. The work resists narrative closure, allowing meaning to surface slowly through presence, duration, and embodied attention. The works resists the cartesian bifurcation of body and mind and insists on experiential and sensory attunement. I attempt this by remaking the world at the scale of film and media and invoke a thread of ancestral survivors to mend a fractured family line.