janilda bartolomeu.
As an audio-visual artist, curator and researcher, Janilda Bartolomeu’s practice communes with the ghosts of colonial pasts, engages acts of disruptive imagination, and navigates diasporic cinemas from across the globe. Working at the crossroads between memory and future speculation, she uses moving images to document current worlds, reimagine old worlds, and conjure new worlds through generative friction. Let’s break spells.
Janilda Bartolomeu has collaborated with Nieuwe Instituut, RAW Material Company, EYE Filmmuseum and New Bedford Whaling Museum, amongst others.
On time, ghosts, roots, routes & crossroads.
previous projects ↓
- Na Caminhu Pa Acácia (2025)
- learning how to breathe (2025)
- in the belly (2025)
- islands traced, cities foreseen (2024)
- _when_scrolling_becomes_scrying (2023)
- Black Atlantic Visions (2023)
- Haunted (2021)
- If The Walls Could Speak (2020)
- The Criolo Lens: agua’d chor, agua’d mar (2018)
- evocations & lamentations (2016)
If The Walls Could Speak.
If The Walls Could Speak (2020)
Concept development.
If The Walls Could Speak (2020)
08:00 min.
EXHIBITION
YouthDem x G/D THYSELF: Spirit Strategy on
Raising Free Black Children
Nieuwe Instituut
21 August 2020
*EARLY WORK*
The short film If The Walls Could Speak (2020) was jointly conceived and produced by the YouthDem group of budding local creatives- which Rotterdam-based, futurist collective Concrete Blossom gathered and guided for this occasion. YouthDem member Janilda Bartolomeu, wrote and directed If The Walls Could Speak and wanted this project to offer a worldview ‘through her Creole lens’. Not confined by linear conceptions of time and space; this short, starring poet and co-writer Susu Aliy, depicts the tempestruous meeting between a young woman and her ancestor.