Becoming mise-en-abyme as we commune with spirits at the Karibu Centre on Gresham Road.
-Meera Shakti Osborne
(re)screening of Bolivian film Blood Of The Condor—a militant retelling of gendered neocolonial intervention—on the evening of Tuesday March 18th 2025.
On March 18th 1979, the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) held the National Black Women’s Conference in Brixton, the first of its kind to address the specific issues faced by Asian, Caribbean and African women living in Britain. As well as talks, performances and workshops, the programme also featured a screening of Blood Of The Condor, hosted in the Abeng Centre, now known as the Karibu Centre where our screening will also take place. The film, shot in 1969, retells the true story of abuses against indigenous Quechua women under the guise of developmental assistance and the community’s quest for revenge. Initially banned by the Bolivian government, its eventual release and ability to raise widespread awareness about the injustice led to the expulsion of the American Peace Corps in 1971
- Abiba Coulibaly (founder, Brixton Community Cinema)
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Gail Lewis and Rabz Lansiquot Karibu Centre in Brixton March 18, 2025
The following text is based on notes I jotted down at an event hosted by Brixton Community Cinema last year. The event included a screening of the film Blood of the Condor and a conversation between Gail Lewis and Rabz Lansiquot at Karibu Centre on Gresham Road, Brixton March 18 2025. Most of my notes are words spoken by Rabz or Gail. I have decided to leave the notes in the form they were originally written. This text is made up of fragments, a meeting of people at a specific time and place with lacunas and very few full sentences. I hope this will leave a door open for you, making space to enter with your own thoughts and opinions. The purple text has been added as I put this piece together. I hope that you will find some meaning within the words that can help to ignite the fire in your belly.
Communicating with spirits
Those who came before us
Sensing
Feeling
Listening
Imagining
Echoing echoes
Sitting with the past while gazing into possible futures. Together. Now and back then. A back and forth in time. A pendulum swinging us into the present, forward and back, before we were here. Back and forth. Somewhere inside of this pendulum we exist alongside our comrades before, after and alongside us.
We watched the film in the presence of many spirits, ghosts and comrades.
Reflections on the subjects within the film
The truth was always known
The truth was exposed
Indigenous knowledges
Old ways of knowing
Being filled with the light
Cocoa leaves
Peasants, rather than proletariat who create change
The film shows us how we are harnessed to an international struggle. Women’s bodies are still at the centre of global capital - which is why Blood of the Condor was screened by OWAAD in 1979 at the Abeng Centre and why the film still feels relevant today.
The conversation evolved from reflections of the film merging into the present moment connecting to the pasts and dreaming-futures
Anti-imperialist struggle, the settlers still remain and are still killing.
We do not lose sight of the international struggle.
Does identity politics oppose anti-imperialist struggle?
Can identity politics be non individualistic?
I remember that Gail and Rabz spoke about the similarities between the political landscape of the 1980s and now. From South Africa to Palestine, colonialism, racism, war, housing, poverty and patriarchal violence. They discussed self-care and how it wasn’t something that Gail’s generation thought about enough and how our generation thinks about it all the time. Somewhere in the same conversation or later on, they spoke about organising before phones, how it meant that everyone saw each other all the time. We are much more isolated now.
The real enemy are the liberals. Martin’s letter from prison reminds us that we mustn’t be fooled by liberalism. The comprador class is the enemy.
We are gesturing towards freedom and liberation. Especially in relation to women’s bodies.
90s/00s reductionist politics of the multiracial liberal state.
To be dislodged from what we already know. To ask who we need to know with.
Our identities get eaten by the system and then sold back to us. It is a relentlessly conniving, calculating machine. The system is cannibalistic.As Basma Mansour writes the act of being seen is inseparable from the act of being devoured.
A film, a soundscape, an image, can’t bring down global power. But can we stay with the discomfort or the questions that the work brings up? Can we bring that into action? We can’t do it alone and we must stay with this discomfort. Cultural production has the potential to become provocation.
Hannah Black writes that both apocalypse and utopia exist at the same time.
sitting next to each other. Ja’Tovia Gary during a talk in 2024 at Cine Lumiere said when you put two images together, a new thought is created. What new thoughts are being created?
Third Cinema Manifesto(Hacia un tercer cine)
Screening films outside of the cinema.
Screenings become a call to action.
Screenings become a call to arms.
How is it possible to walk with those that are me and those that are not me in ways that foster movements towards freedom? Organising across difference.
To pose the political question of building alliances with people who are different. And I mean non-dominant difference. While holding on to specificities. We aren’t trying to assimilate into us all being the same. We are finding the links and finding the differences in order to understand racism and power in the nuances of it.
To counter cyclical global capital - to hold on (together).
The links across different racialised populations.
How do we get mobilised into action that pays attention to fascism and liberal bourgeoisie?
What do we need to give up?
Pinpointing the central issues in our specific locations. Learning from others. No single individual knows the requirements. Allowing ourselves to make mistakes. To have generous relationships with each other that allow space for mistakes, for stumbling and rising stronger.
What will make us brave enough to pick up the struggle? To gather and move with force and intent? To what and to whom do we move towards? Moving towards understanding, feeling, connecting differently.
Someone asks a question about hope and Lewis responds that hope and despair sit next to each other.Hope and despair sitting next to each other. What new thought is created?
Lansiquot: Go and listen to It’s After The End Of The World
“It's after the end of the world. Don't you know that yet? If you're not a myth, whose reality are you? If you're not a reality, whose myth are you? I don't intend to become a citizen of this planet -- it takes too long.” - Sun Ra
Lewis: I want to tell you that the world has ended many times
Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L. By June Jordan
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
GENOCIDE TO STOP
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION AND REACTION
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC
OUT THE WINDOWS
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY
NOBODY COLD
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED
JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
BOUNDARIES TO DISAPPEAR [...]
There are spirits in this space that are thrusting us forward
There are spirits in this space that are thrusting us forward
Appendix
Africa is in many ways key to the understanding of the role of the peasants in a world order in transition. The first new, independent state to be established on that continent was Ghana. The rise of Nkrumah in Ghana was ultimately determined by the peasant population in both political and social terms. While Nkrumah built a certain base for his political party in the major city of Accra, it was his tireless campaigning in the most outlying parts of the country among the rural people which produced the situation where the once all-powerful Colonial Office had to bring him out of jail to govern. No one else could govern the country. The population, ready, as Nkrumah has written, for anything, had seen to that.
The closeness of the city people to the peasantry in Ghana created the objective environment for the unification of the mass of the population, both in city and country. The market women who have for centuries united town and country through well-established domestic marketing arrangements, the internal migration of people, and the sophistication of the: coastal population, provided the bridge to the more distant rural population.
-C.L.R. James
-Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino
The PFU [Palestine Film Unit, which later became Palestinian Cinema Institute (PCI)] consisted of a small group of Palestinian filmmakers who emerged in Amman in 1968[...]committed to making films within the Palestinian revolution. Created with modest means and under precarious conditions, most of their films are quite short, shot in black and white and conceptually straightforward. As texts arising out of a national liberation movement in progress, they are necessarily focused on communicating and processing information and emotions related to current events, rather than on intervening in theoretical understandings about the nature of the image and mediation. Nonetheless, as attempts to communicate in new ways about an active revolution, the films engage with many of the same ideas that inform the works of the visiting Japanese and European filmmakers [in 1970 Fatah (with funding from the Arab League) commissioned [Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin to make a film title Until Victory, which was never completed]. In doing so, the Palestinian films offer a concrete example of the enactment of third cinema and the messiness inherent within such a movement as it emerges from ongoing political struggle.
The story of the PFU is one of the creation ab ovo of a cinematic practice concurrently with an emerging revolutionary movement, one that sought not just to reflect or mediate that movement, but also to play an integral transformative role, culturally and politically, within it.
- Nadia G Yaqub
- Gail Lewis
By Meera Shakti Osborne
Edited by Hania Mariam Luthufi
With special thanks to Chetna Mithi for your thoughts and references.
Meera is a multi-media artist and youth worker from London. Meera's work explores landscapes as sites of reckoning and renewal, exploring the subject of apocalypses and utopias that sit side by side each other. Meera advocates for a free Palestine and a free Sudan. They support self-determination and believe another world is possible. They are currently working inside archives focused on community safety at Metroland Cultures in nw London.
On March 18th 1979, the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) held the National Black Women’s Conference in Brixton, the first of its kind to address the specific issues faced by Asian, Caribbean and African women living in Britain. As well as talks, performances and workshops, the programme also featured a screening of Blood Of The Condor, hosted in the Abeng Centre, now known as the Karibu Centre where our screening will also take place. The film, shot in 1969, retells the true story of abuses against indigenous Quechua women under the guise of developmental assistance and the community’s quest for revenge. Initially banned by the Bolivian government, its eventual release and ability to raise widespread awareness about the injustice led to the expulsion of the American Peace Corps in 1971
- Abiba Coulibaly (founder, Brixton Community Cinema)
Gail Lewis and Rabz Lansiquot Karibu Centre in Brixton March 18, 2025
The following text is based on notes I jotted down at an event hosted by Brixton Community Cinema last year. The event included a screening of the film Blood of the Condor and a conversation between Gail Lewis and Rabz Lansiquot at Karibu Centre on Gresham Road, Brixton March 18 2025. Most of my notes are words spoken by Rabz or Gail. I have decided to leave the notes in the form they were originally written. This text is made up of fragments, a meeting of people at a specific time and place with lacunas and very few full sentences. I hope this will leave a door open for you, making space to enter with your own thoughts and opinions. The purple text has been added as I put this piece together. I hope that you will find some meaning within the words that can help to ignite the fire in your belly.
In the early hours of March 18 2025, after a couple of months of a murky ‘ceasefire’, Israel resumed its genocidal assault across the Gaza Strip, murdering at least 330 people overnight. The screening was slightly postponed to accommodate those attending the emergency demo on Downing Street, demanding that the UK government stop arming Israel. Many of us came to the Karibu Centre directly from the protests. We arrived feeling broken, angry and in need of sharing space together, with this film and the conversations that followed.
Reflections on watching Blood of The Condor
Communicating with spirits
Those who came before us
Sensing
Feeling
Listening
Imagining
Echoing echoes
Sitting with the past while gazing into possible futures. Together. Now and back then. A back and forth in time. A pendulum swinging us into the present, forward and back, before we were here. Back and forth. Somewhere inside of this pendulum we exist alongside our comrades before, after and alongside us.
As I read over the notes from last year, I return to Gresham Road. I am sitting in the Karibu Centre. I think of the others that filled the room with me. I think of the people watching Blood of the Condor 46 years before us. I think of all those who dreamt of a better world and continue to dream. The multiplicity of existence is inescapable. Barby Asante said that
there are spirits in this space that are thrusting us forward.We watched the film in the presence of many spirits, ghosts and comrades.
Reflections on the subjects within the film
The truth was always knownThe truth was exposed
Indigenous knowledges
Old ways of knowing
Being filled with the light
Cocoa leaves
Peasants, rather than proletariat who create change
The film shows us how we are harnessed to an international struggle. Women’s bodies are still at the centre of global capital - which is why Blood of the Condor was screened by OWAAD in 1979 at the Abeng Centre and why the film still feels relevant today.
Abeng is a Twi word commonly used in the Caribbean, especially in Jamaica - it means a horn that sounds, which is often but not exclusively, a conch shell. Karibu, in Swahili, means welcome. The past calling out to the present. The present welcomes the abeng.
There are spirits in this space that are thrusting us forward.The conversation evolved from reflections of the film merging into the present moment connecting to the pasts and dreaming-futures
Anti-imperialist struggle, the settlers still remain and are still killing.
We do not lose sight of the international struggle.
Does identity politics oppose anti-imperialist struggle?
Can identity politics be non individualistic?
I remember that Gail and Rabz spoke about the similarities between the political landscape of the 1980s and now. From South Africa to Palestine, colonialism, racism, war, housing, poverty and patriarchal violence. They discussed self-care and how it wasn’t something that Gail’s generation thought about enough and how our generation thinks about it all the time. Somewhere in the same conversation or later on, they spoke about organising before phones, how it meant that everyone saw each other all the time. We are much more isolated now.
The real enemy are the liberals. Martin’s letter from prison reminds us that we mustn’t be fooled by liberalism. The comprador class is the enemy.
We are gesturing towards freedom and liberation. Especially in relation to women’s bodies.
90s/00s reductionist politics of the multiracial liberal state.
To be dislodged from what we already know. To ask who we need to know with.
Our identities get eaten by the system and then sold back to us. It is a relentlessly conniving, calculating machine. The system is cannibalistic.
As Basma Mansour writes the act of being seen is inseparable from the act of being devoured.
A film, a soundscape, an image, can’t bring down global power. But can we stay with the discomfort or the questions that the work brings up? Can we bring that into action? We can’t do it alone and we must stay with this discomfort. Cultural production has the potential to become provocation.
Hannah Black writes that both apocalypse and utopia exist at the same time.
I visualise the image of OWWAD members sitting at the Abeng centre on 18 March 1979 , watching Blood of the Condor, and I remember the image of us Brixton Community Cinema members sitting at the Karibu centre watching Blood of the Condor, 46 years later on the same date. I am thinking about the
apocalypse and utopiasitting next to each other. Ja’Tovia Gary during a talk in 2024 at Cine Lumiere said when you put two images together, a new thought is created. What new thoughts are being created?
I imagine us as a reflection of the past, and the past as a reflection of the future. We are creating infinite reflections. What is revealed as we become mirrors reflecting other mirrors, mise-en-abyme in endless loops.
Third Cinema Manifesto
(Hacia un tercer cine)
Screening films outside of the cinema.
Screenings become a call to action.
Screenings become a call to arms.
How is it possible to walk with those that are me and those that are not me in ways that foster movements towards freedom? Organising across difference.
To pose the political question of building alliances with people who are different. And I mean non-dominant difference. While holding on to specificities. We aren’t trying to assimilate into us all being the same. We are finding the links and finding the differences in order to understand racism and power in the nuances of it.
To counter cyclical global capital - to hold on (together).
The links across different racialised populations.
How do we get mobilised into action that pays attention to fascism and liberal bourgeoisie?
What do we need to give up?
Pinpointing the central issues in our specific locations. Learning from others. No single individual knows the requirements. Allowing ourselves to make mistakes. To have generous relationships with each other that allow space for mistakes, for stumbling and rising stronger.
What will make us brave enough to pick up the struggle? To gather and move with force and intent? To what and to whom do we move towards? Moving towards understanding, feeling, connecting differently.
Someone asks a question about hope and Lewis responds that hope and despair sit next to each other.
Hope and despair sitting next to each other. What new thought is created?
Lansiquot: Go and listen to It’s After The End Of The World
“It's after the end of the world. Don't you know that yet? If you're not a myth, whose reality are you? If you're not a reality, whose myth are you? I don't intend to become a citizen of this planet -- it takes too long.” - Sun Ra
Lewis: I want to tell you that the world has ended many times
The conversation ends and no one moves for a long moment, a long exhale. Then we begin to move towards each other, reaching out for connection. The spirits are still with us. We are reaching out to them too.
Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L. By June Jordan
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
GENOCIDE TO STOP
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION AND REACTION
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC
OUT THE WINDOWS
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY
NOBODY COLD
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED
JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
BOUNDARIES TO DISAPPEAR [...]
There are spirits in this space that are thrusting us forward
There are spirits in this space that are thrusting us forward
Appendix
-
The Gathering Forces, The Third World – The Peasantry (1967)
Africa is in many ways key to the understanding of the role of the peasants in a world order in transition. The first new, independent state to be established on that continent was Ghana. The rise of Nkrumah in Ghana was ultimately determined by the peasant population in both political and social terms. While Nkrumah built a certain base for his political party in the major city of Accra, it was his tireless campaigning in the most outlying parts of the country among the rural people which produced the situation where the once all-powerful Colonial Office had to bring him out of jail to govern. No one else could govern the country. The population, ready, as Nkrumah has written, for anything, had seen to that.
The closeness of the city people to the peasantry in Ghana created the objective environment for the unification of the mass of the population, both in city and country. The market women who have for centuries united town and country through well-established domestic marketing arrangements, the internal migration of people, and the sophistication of the: coastal population, provided the bridge to the more distant rural population.
-C.L.R. James
-
Hacia un tercer cine /Toward a Third Cinema (1969)
-Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino
-
Toward a Palestinian Third Cinema, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (2018)
The PFU [Palestine Film Unit, which later became Palestinian Cinema Institute (PCI)] consisted of a small group of Palestinian filmmakers who emerged in Amman in 1968[...]committed to making films within the Palestinian revolution. Created with modest means and under precarious conditions, most of their films are quite short, shot in black and white and conceptually straightforward. As texts arising out of a national liberation movement in progress, they are necessarily focused on communicating and processing information and emotions related to current events, rather than on intervening in theoretical understandings about the nature of the image and mediation. Nonetheless, as attempts to communicate in new ways about an active revolution, the films engage with many of the same ideas that inform the works of the visiting Japanese and European filmmakers [in 1970 Fatah (with funding from the Arab League) commissioned [Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin to make a film title Until Victory, which was never completed]. In doing so, the Palestinian films offer a concrete example of the enactment of third cinema and the messiness inherent within such a movement as it emerges from ongoing political struggle.
The story of the PFU is one of the creation ab ovo of a cinematic practice concurrently with an emerging revolutionary movement, one that sought not just to reflect or mediate that movement, but also to play an integral transformative role, culturally and politically, within it.
- Nadia G Yaqub
-
On Listening - Five Thoughts, Radio Ballads Songs for Change (2025)
- Gail Lewis
By Meera Shakti Osborne
Edited by Hania Mariam Luthufi
With special thanks to Chetna Mithi for your thoughts and references.
Meera is a multi-media artist and youth worker from London. Meera's work explores landscapes as sites of reckoning and renewal, exploring the subject of apocalypses and utopias that sit side by side each other. Meera advocates for a free Palestine and a free Sudan. They support self-determination and believe another world is possible. They are currently working inside archives focused on community safety at Metroland Cultures in nw London.