Unhousing Restitution (UNREST). African audiovisual heritage between displacement and return

Unhousing Restitution (henceforth UNREST) is a two-year interdisciplinary project that researches, refines and disseminates practice-oriented and Africa-led solutions to African loss of audiovisual heritage. Co-produced with cultural partners by researchers from film studies, African history and digital humanities, UNREST recasts restitution as a collaborative endeavour co-led with international partners and rooted in shared knowledge production and cultural renewal. The project’s framing term, ‘unhousing’, derives from Sudanese artist-filmmaker Hussein Shariffe. Writing in exile from Sudanese dictatorship, Shariffe described the depredations, but also the ‘unhoused energies’ released by states of dislocation. UNREST harnesses those energies by working with archives born in states of dislocation and retrieved by independent archivists working at a tangent to nation-state practice. The research context is one of radical archival loss. Only eight African states boast national film archives. UNESCO concluded in 2021 that African cinema’s ‘best surviving elements’ are ‘almost never found in Africa’. Shared historical narratives are silenced and cultural imaginaries diminished by this loss. Yet public debate and restitutionary action remain sparse. AHRC-funded research on film and Empire has revealed UK film archives replete with colonial-era collections. The BFI, however, records only one successful instance of colonial film restitution (to Trinidad and Tobago). The lack of available models presents urgent challenges in a current context of global geopolitical realignment, and long-delayed demands for restitution of Global South heritage. European moves to meet those demands accelerated with French President Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 declaration of the moral rights of formerly colonised peoples to cultural heritage restitution. Sarr and Savoy’s foundational 2020 follow-up report outlined first principles for restitution of African cultural heritage. The challenge remains, however, to find flexible restitution modes that meet ethical demands for reparatory justice, while overcoming obstacles including budgetary constraints, Global South infrastructure deficits, inflexible legal frameworks, and postcolonial socio-political volatility. UNREST responds with a collaborative project that combines historical enquiry, digital archive development and creative research on two African case studies: Sudan and Ghana. Our aim is to move restitution debates from a focus on the politics of return, to practices of shared transnational history-making, infrastructure development and creative renewal. The project emerges from extensive prior work. PI Carter and Co-I Abdelrahman have led development of a prototype digital archive housing the document collection of Hussein Shariffe. Co-I Hodgkinson worked with Ghanaian partners during a 3-year Leverhulme Fellowship to chart possibilities of archival retrieval for Nkrumah-era films. UNREST brings the three researchers together for a comparative project exploring shared problematics and solutions. It engages a partner network spanning Cairo, Accra, Tamale, Berlin, Khartoum and London. The common aim is, through collaboration with Global South archivists, researchers, artists, filmmakers and technical specialists, to develop and test new approaches to audiovisual heritage restitution including collaborative historical research; community digital archiving; digital repatriation based on shared governance; and creative projects where restitution becomes a democratic practice of reclamation by dispossessed communities. Objectives include digital repatriation of two internationally significant screen heritage collections—the Shariffe and Hesse Collections, the latter named after Kwame Nkrumah’s personal cameraman and UNREST Advisory Board member Chris Hesse; and the development and dissemination of transferable and scalable methodologies for audiovisual heritage restitution in Global South locales. The research has potential applications across the audiovisual heritage sector but will particularly benefit displaced and/or marginalised young filmmakers building creative livelihoods in precarious locales.