Ufuoma Essi
Ufuoma Essi Is a video artist and filmmaker from Lewisham, South East London. She works predominantly with film and moving image as well as photography and sound.
Her work revolves around Black feminist epistemology and the configuration of displaced histories.The archive forms an essential medium for her as an artist and it’s through explorations with the archive that she aims to interrogate and disrupt the silences and gaps of the historical narrative. By using the archive as a process of unlearning and discovery she seeks to re-centre the marginalised histories of the Black Atlantic and specific histories of Black women. Drawing from a range of influences including black popular culture, films, music, historical texts and black feminist theory from writers such as Claudia Jones to Daphne A. Brooks. Essi’s work also seeks to examine the historical and contemporary links between the Black Atlantic and explores intersectional themes of race, gender, class and sexuality.
[Image: Ufuoma Essi, still from ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind, 2019]
@ufuoma.essi
External link to my research presented on the hot glue account
The webpage presents my notes, thoughts in process, annotations and reflections that I recorded during the process of researching as well as the “outcomes” of the research, extracts from the oral histories and scans of transcripts from the collection.
Ufuoma has been researching DADZIE, the papers of writer, historian and educator Stella Dadzie (all material courtesy of Stella Dadzie), and The Heart of The Race oral history collection. For more information about accessing Black Cultural Archives collections, please visit blackculturalarchives.org/collections