‘What a Machine!’

Two women, a bed, an armchair and the beautiful outside. After Bruce Baillie’s All My Life (1966).

Panning shots describe the space of a room as a succession of still lives: a chair, some fruit on a table, a collection of solitary, waiting objects. Sitting on the bed there is the presence of a young woman: the filmmaker herself, eating an apple.

In this film, the artist is captured slowly counting out grains of sand to measure the passing of time. Starting from a tightly cropped close-up of the artist’s hands, the image slowly expands outwards to reveal the figure performing the action. The camera moves around the artist in a spiral motion, leaving a trace of the cameraperson’s feet in the sand. The spiral shape is reminiscent of Robert Smithson’s earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970), made in the same period. Where Smithson’s earthwork imprints a sense of permanence onto nature, Grisi’s work is always underscored by the body’s ephemeral touch, from the way the sand blows off the artist’s fingers to the cameraperson’s transient footprints.

This small cinematic exchange offers a glimpse into a women’s collective based in Agadez (Niger). The camera zooms in on womens working hands revealing the harsh conditions of their daily lives. While separating peanuts from their shells, the women talk to each other about the men passing by and the film maker being present.The short encounter questions how the camera could be used by both the women in front and behind the camera to find a way of getting in contact with each other while not sharing a common language.

Portrait broadcast on the television program Mosaique, devoted to immigrant cultures. A young Senegalese woman, cook in a workers’ hostel, evokes her desire to travel throughout France, and protests against the designation of immigrant.

A barber school haircut training video on how to give a white person an ​“Afro” hair-do.

White Afro employs an archival instructional video on how to offer curly perms or body waving services to a white clientele, ostensibly for financial gain. The training video is intermingled with Owusu’s mother’s experience working as a hairstylist at a predominantly white hair salon called Fantastic Sam’s in Alexandria, Virginia. Offering a rare perspective on the Afro hairstyle – as an unmistakable marker of Black collective power that becomes a desirable, and appropriated, aesthetic during liberation movements – the film also expands on the abilities of non-Black beauticians and barbers to wield their shops as spaces for political change.

Why would you like to get braids?
How come you can dance like this?
She says she is black. Well she has Brazilian hair.
Talking about Jesus and teaching me some moves.

“By sticking sellotape to my skin and then peeling it off, I took off the top surface of my skin. I then stuck the tape and the skin to clear 16mm film. I have made a film of how much space I take up and this takes 11 minutes to watch.” (Emma Hart)