Film Screening: Moving Materials

Using film, Meghan Ho-Tong and Joyce Joumaa explore how colonial infrastructures endure in material, social and political terms.

Meghan Ho-Tong and Joyce Joumaa use film to explore how colonial infrastructures endure in material, social and political terms. Drawing on different geographical contexts, they combine moving images and archival material to challenge established narratives about land and infrastructure, reframing them from alternative perspectives.

Meghan Ho-Tong, Where the Ground Refuses the Line (15 minutes, 2026)

This video essay examines the NZASM railway line in South Africa as a prime example of the extractive practices that transformed land into territory and reduced people to labour. Through an examination of colonial archives and lived realities, the film attempts to open up the archive and highlight what has been silenced. The film reflects on the constraints, tensions and forms of resistance associated with the railway.

Joyce Joumaa, To Remain in the No Longer (37 minutes, 2023)

In 1962, Oscar Niemeyer was invited to design an international exhibition complex in Tripoli, Lebanon – a project that was never completed. By exploring the fragile state of the still surviving unfinished project site, the film reflects on the country’s current socio-economic crisis.

The screenings will be followed by a discussion, which will be moderated by Serah Calitz. She has researched The Story of Matsela (1946), a colonial educational film project that promoted new agricultural methods in southern Africa.

Research into Collections with a Colonial Context

This programme forms part of the project Moving Materials: Architecture, Extraction, and Colonial Railway Infrastructures in South Africa, which is supported by an NWO grant under the umbrella of the Research into Collections with a Colonial Context programme. Meghan Ho-Tong leads this project as a visiting researcher at the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, in collaboration with Alejandro Campos and Dirk van den Heuvel.