'Introduction: Onyeka Igwe - Archive, Resistance, Reimagining'

Working across film, video and installation, Onyeka Igwe’s moving-image practice is shaped by material, embodied engagements with the residues of colonial archives, and by a reckoning with diasporic histories from her perspective as a British-Nigerian artist. This dossier responds to a burgeoning interest in Igwe’s work, in scholarly and curatorial contexts. It emerges from a symposium that took place at the University of Cambridge in May 2024, marking the culmination of Igwe’s time there as Filmmaker in Residence. Together, the essays and the conversation with Igwe included here consider how her work explores the latent, promissory dimensions of archives, alongside the decolonial, worldmaking possibilities of myths and fabulation. As the dossier opens onto a range of critical debates – about the decolonial remediation of archives, the restitution of African film heritage, and speculative histories in and about moving-image practice – a central claim made here is that Igwe’s work acts as a vital interlocutor and critical companion in the thinking through of such questions.