The Past is Not Another Country: Doing Archives Differently

Ein neues Wort (AT) by Cana Bilir-Meier is based on transcribed television and radio material from the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. A choir musically interprets texts from archives in front of the camera. The work focuses on linguistic attributions, the term ›guest worker‹, racism, and the so-called ›elevator effect‹, which symbolises the social advancement of German employees and the simultaneous exclusion of migrant workers. 

Nnenna Onuoha's essayistic video work Living in a Developing Country—Revisited (AT) engages with the 1975 BBC educational film Developing Country Ghana: Life in the City. Through conversations with the protagonists portrayed at the time and their current perspectives on the historical film material, a multi-layered reflection on representation, memory and postcolonial image politics emerges.

Following the premiere screenings of both works on Friday 12 SEP at 6.30pm, they will be viewable as a looped video installation at Sinema Transtopia from Saturday to Sunday.

Commissioned by Sinema Transtopia ©2025.

In the framework of the project The Past is Not Another Country—a project by Sinema Transtopia and DFF—Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum.

Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.

In The Past is Not Another Country: Doing Archives Differently, Sinema Transtopia and the the DFF join forces with artists, filmmakers, archivists and activists to ask: How do patterns of power travel through film history and film archives? How might these patterns be disrupted? How can narratives be revised and reframed to tell a different story in the future? This two-year project aims to question and update practices of collecting, presenting, and mediating film.

Cana Bilir-Meier lives and works in Munich. She studied Art and Digital Media, Film, and Art Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Sabancı University in Istanbul. Her work as a filmmaker and artist spans film, performance, and text, exploring the intersections of archival practice, historical research, contemporary media reflection, and archaeology. She is a co-founder of the initiative in honor of Semra Ertan and co-editor of the poetry collection Mein Name ist Ausländer—Benim Adım Yabancı.

Nnenna Onuoha is a Ghanaian-Nigerian researcher, filmmaker and visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her work explores monumental silences surrounding the histories and afterlives of colonialism across West Africa, Europe and the United States, and has been shown at festivals and institutions such as Jeu de Paume, Galerie im Turm, and the Johannesburg Art Gallery. She is currently pursuing a joint PhD at Harvard and the University of Potsdam, researching de/post/colonial remembrance cultures in Berlin.