A Super 8 film, shot in 1967 in Dar-es-Salaam, shows the rehearsal of a theatrical play; a white man guides a group of young black men. Slow temporality and tender relations can be felt between them that contrasts with the revelation of the acting scene: an inert body is forced to a rendition movement. There are palm trees in the landscape and a sign fixed to the ground shows the words, “The Mozambique Institute”.
 
Archive images always hold the promise to retain any historical truth, but this promise comes often coupled with a potential disloyalty, when a simple transposition of context, of wording, will, in time, in space, betray it without too much effort. As a short visual essay, Effects of Wording feels free to exhaust the notion of the archive as a driving force and sign of “reading the world” by looking – on three different continents – the story of the Institute of Mozambique.
 
Credits:
Effects of wording |The Mozambique Archive Series
Stereo sound Video HD color, 29’
By Catarina SImão
Editor Fernanda Gurgel
Lisbon, 2014