Dossier: re-sounding the colonial archive. Decolonial archive practice in the films of Onyeka Igwe and Petna Ndaliko Katondolo

This dossier comprises two long-form interviews with filmmakers who use colonial-era archives as resources for a decolonial re-remembering of African and Afro-diasporic experience. Onyeka Igwe is a British filmmaker of Nigerian heritage who has worked since the late 2010s to critically refigure audiovisual and other documentary material from British and Nigerian archive spaces and collections. Petna Ndaliko Katondolo is a Congolese filmmaker, educator and ancestral ecologist who turns to films made in Congo under Belgian colonial rule as resources for an Afrofuturist reimagining of Congolese landscapes and bodies. A dossier introduction presents a selection of films by Igwe and Ndaliko Katondolo, drawing out affinities in an approach to colonial archives that relocates and critically refigures colonial film footage and archival spaces through decolonial documentary and embodied performance practice. A particular focus of both interviews is sound as an embodied gesture that registers unseen presences in colonial archives, enabling their refiguring as sites of intergenerational and ancestral African and Afro-diasporic histories, multiplicitous memories and dissident futurities.