Lateral Roma is happy to open its new season with a screening of the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered by Onyeka Igwe. Realized in 2019, the work is inscribed in Igwe’s research on and through the archive, its loss, lies and amnesias, and especially its implication with the colonial gaze.

The film blends together familial biography, archival footage and contemporary documentation, Nollywood film clips and literature, folktales, voice recordings and choreography. Rearranging this material, Igwe embroiders a personal narration which ties and unties multiple threads: the story of her grandfather, but also the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria.

Images and words flow and chase each other on screen, testing the mechanisms of representation and generating private mythologies and multiple fictions, that oppose the untruths of history and memory. As stated by curator and writer Tendai John Mutumbu “the names have changed throws the ordinary and the everyday within the archive into relief by daring to write and re-write the stories of diasporic African life against the grain of colonial history's master narratives”. 

Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation, born and based in London, UK. Through her work, Onyeka is animated by the question —  how do we live together? — with particular interest in the ways the sensorial, spatial and non-canonical ways of knowing can provide answers to this question.

Lateral Roma is happy to open its new season with a screening of the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered by Onyeka Igwe. Realized in 2019, the work is inscribed in Igwe’s research on and through the archive, its loss, lies and amnesias, and especially its implication with the colonial gaze.

The film blends together familial biography, archival footage and contemporary documentation, Nollywood film clips and literature, folktales, voice recordings and choreography. Rearranging this material, Igwe embroiders a personal narration which ties and unties multiple threads: the story of her grandfather, but also the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria.

Images and words flow and chase each other on screen, testing the mechanisms of representation and generating private mythologies and multiple fictions, that oppose the untruths of history and memory. As stated by curator and writer Tendai John Mutumbu “the names have changed throws the ordinary and the everyday within the archive into relief by daring to write and re-write the stories of diasporic African life against the grain of colonial history's master narratives”. 

Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation, born and based in London, UK. Through her work, Onyeka is animated by the question —  how do we live together? — with particular interest in the ways the sensorial, spatial and non-canonical ways of knowing can provide answers to this question.