MMIRI: Origin Stories
MMIRI: Origin Stories is a cautionary tale about what happens when we fail to recall our beginnings and allow for our creative faculties to be co-opted. The film introduces us to the central conflict of young artist Nnenna and her quest to relearn and regenerate a new perspective of her African-American heritage. Nnenna is a first-generation Nigerian-American woman who has recently come to terms with the emotional discomfort she's endured from a lack of knowledge of her African history. After fast-tracking her way through education and great success Nnenna discovers a lingering discontent with herself and her perceived reality. She initiates a series of conversations about her and her family's origin story to better understand the intrusive visions that have been closing in on her and her psyche. Finally, through extraordinary intervention the artist is able to gain the insight needed about the roots she's inherited and the legacy that awaits her.
As a short experimental film, this narrative ultimately offers an artist’s intimate perspective on storytelling, the creative process, and the power of self-authoring. Drawing from surrealism, West African aesthetics, contemporary fantasy, and the Black imaginary, this film invites us to reconsider history and the possibility of what becomes of those who have lost contact or been stolen away from home.
In addition to the The Reason Why We Hunt Prologue for film, MMIRI: Origin Stories artist Alexandria Eregbu introduces The Dream Team a selection of artists, writers, and critical thinkers who have responded to a selection of symbolic elements from the film’s visual narrative: the mask, the mirror, the knife, the compass, the photograph. Over the course of the eight day partnership with L’Autre Expo, these artist’s work and their creations — short video, audio, images, drawings, poetry, and short essays will be released on the project website’s map in conversation with Alexandria Eregbu, posing a series of questions, reflections, and lessons of self-discovery, for visitors to enjoy and engage, finally unlocking the imaginary world of MMIRI and it’s vast community of influence for which this film came to be.
The artwork was available from February 24th to March 3rd, 2021.
For the Other·Expo (l’Autre·expo), Alexandria Eregbu collaborates with :
Devin Cain
Devin Cain is a Chicago-based filmmaker, educator and writer. His artistic journey began as a theatre practitioner specializing in comedic performance and monologue writing. After two years working in children’s theatre, he pursued his passion for cinema studying at Columbia College Chicago. Presently, he teaches filmmaking in public schools to youth focusing on visual literacy, personal storytelling, and horror aesthetics. Devin’s films are more about the process of self-authoring and interrogation, exploring and expanding the limits of cinema’s narrative capabilities, by having the aesthetic exhibit the behavior of the subject’s psychic reality.
Reginald Eldridge, Jr.
Reginald Eldridge, Jr is a writer and multidisciplinary artist who seeks, through narrative, image-making and inquiry, to engage thought in performance, history, race, ontology and myth.
→ Learn more : www.whoisrjel.com
Nnamdi Ibekwe
Nnamdi Ibekwe was born in Aba, Nigeria. He is based in Chicago or sometimes Dallas, when he is not flaneuring - mostly somewhere in Africa. He is a stubborn entrepreneur, has a tech background and loves African literature.
Lace The Artist
Lace The Artist, is a gender-fluid, multidisciplinary memoir artist, actor, designer, and creative director. Their work addresses nature, spirituality, vulnerability, and self-discovery as a means to shape healing, personal power, and liberation.
Patrick Lentz
With a background in educational psychology and art, Patrick Lentz believes that the camera has the power to transform the way we understand the world and the people around us. By mixing practices of documentary photography, community organizing, and human development, his goal is to encourage young people in Chicago to be their own storytellers.
His work ranges from documenting social movements to exploring narratives around grief and nostalgia after the loss of his dad the day after his 16th birthday. Working with a mixture of analog and digital photography, he believes in the power of storytelling and sees it as an inherently political process.
As a recent graduate from University of Illinois at Chicago, he continues to examine the crossroads of education, image making, and human psychology. By engaging youth in these practices, he strives to actualize these intersections through a curriculum that centers young peoples' insight and imagination.
Partners
This project is part of a partnership between Étant donnés and the Ford Foundation to promote the African-American art scene in France. Étant donnés Contemporary Art is a program of the French American Cultural Exchange (FACE) Foundation, developed in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, with the support of Institut Français-Paris, the French Ministry of Culture, the Ford Foundation, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the ADAGP.