+1-home, 2021
"I’ve carried the calling card you had left at the bottom of that bowl for years."
"We’ve often looked at landscapes and immortalized them into the designs you’ve neatly organized around our home. May they grow and change, and may each square become a reminder of where the needle is and where the thread is from."
"One can easily waste hours searching for a crevice where hair hides, in clumps or singular strands."
Courtesy of artists (Mwambu and El-Omari)
Calling cards always sat in a bowl at the entrance of our childhood homes, from Uganda to Egypt and Palestine, through various lands and onto Turtle Island. For separated families, calling cards were a way to witness a connection across generations and displacements, from here to wherever home is. With a global pandemic restructuring the world, communications have not only been a window into the past but have also woven a canvas of growing modes of future connections and new ways to share, speak, and recall places. +1-home is a digital platform on which our practices as experimental filmmakers amalgamate with a digital installation of non-linear space, time, and storytelling.
Photo credit: Carine Zahner
Sonya Mwambu is an experimental filmmaker and editor based in Toronto. Born in Kampala, they grew up in Canada and their work centres on the intersections of their identities through the exploration of race, language and the connections they find through their cultural identity and the experimentations of analog film. Mwambu holds a BFA in Film Production from York University.
Follow Sonya @sonya.mwambu
Photo credit: Carine Zahner
Nada El-Omari is a filmmaker and writer. Of Palestinian and Egyptian origin and raised in Montreal, her work, practice and research interests centre on the intergenerational transmissions of memories, displacement and the stories of belonging and identity through a poetic, hybrid lens. El-Omari holds a BFA in Film Production and MFA in Film from York University.
Follow Nada @nadaelomari_
Nada El-Omari & Sonya Mwambu's residency period: June 3 - September 10, 2021
