WHEN RAIN CLOUDS GATHER

Single-channel video color sound 29’

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film and co-produced by Adrian Alea for the exhibition Nebula 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione In Between Art Film

CHRISTIAN NYAMPETA

is an artist who lives and works in New York, London, the Netherlands, and Rwanda. Nyampeta is a convenor of the Nyanza Working Group of ARAC – Another Roadmap School, which participated in documenta fifteen. His recent exhibitions were presented in institutions such as Shanghai Biennale (2023); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; Istanbul Biennal; and Manifesta 14, Pristina (all in 2022). In 2019, Nyampeta was awarded with the Art Prize Future of Europe by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig, and the European Union Prize at the Bamako Encounters – African Biennial of Photography. Nyampeta was the convener of the Boda Boda Lounge 2022, a trans-African film and video art festival co-initiated by Centre d’Art Waza, Lubumbashi. Nyampeta is also a Member of Faculty at the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts, New York, where he teaches Performance. Nyampeta is a member of the Board of Directors at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and a board member of November magazine.

In a fictional situation, three artist friends debate how to spend one of their few remaining Saturday nights in New York. Interpreted by artist and documentary filmmaker Maliyamungu Gift Muhande, artist and filmmaker Akeema-Zane, and Christian Nyampeta, their dialogue is centered around life’s little annoyances in the face of a world ablaze with unjust wars and cruel exterminations. Through improvisation and collaboration with theater maker and director Adrian Alea, their conversation draws from the works and ideas of Black and African writers and film makers who reflected on exile, social life, and urgent cultural action in the society of their time. The film borrows its title from Bessie Head’s 1969 novel of the same name, and its script loosely reenacts Sembène Ousmane’s short story In the Face of History (1962). The film does not rehearse irony but an “anticipatory inertia” that, as one of the songs here has it, may guard the world against the missteps and blunders that we call progress. The protagonists lead their lives in defiance of imminent disaster, against which their cultural privilege offers no shield. This results in spirited half-actions, incomplete answers, and moral dilemmas. The film looks both back and forward, as well as being an exercise in cooperative filmmaking. An animated section of the film emerges from a mutual learning circle convened periodically by Nyampeta at the Centre d’art Waza in Lubumbashi. It asks: How do we know what we know? Finally, a short film directed by artist and filmmaker Kivu Ruhorahoza pays tribute to past and future generations whose childhood is without grown-ups. Are the adults at work? Are they inside with guests or busy with domestic chores? Or are they hiding and sheltering from the atrocities unfolding outside the gate? Are the children becoming orphans without realizing it? The seating provided is borrowed from the local community of the Castello neighborhood in Venice, inviting Nyampeta’s practices of gathering and communion into the exhibition (space).