Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc
ça va, ça va, on continue






When watching ça va, ça va, on continue for the first time, one keeps wondering: is all of this true? Did it happen for real? If we pay attention, if we listen, we discover the clues the artist left along the way: this voice is a fiction, says the one coming from what seems to be an old school recorder. Using the tools of documentary, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc delivers a fictional narrative informed by very real elements. Between the first scene, a restaging of the Angolese author and revolutionary Pepetela’s theatre piece A Corda (1979), and the last monologue, which translates an excerpt of Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (1990) by afrofeminist theoretician bell hooks, we also encounter archival images the artist found from the Mario Soares Foundation. Excerpts of Sarah Maldoror’s films and footage of The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola also intertwine, foregrounding the part children and women played in the movement before 1966. Combined, these existing artistic and intellectual productions nourish an entirely made-up story filled with imaginary characters, creating multiple layers of voices that both narrate and question silenced histories. Kleyebe Abonnenc uses his work to highlight forgotten historical events and people and, by doing so, contributes to writing another collective memory. To this end, he examines his own trajectory to address the production of hegemonic cultural contents and their colonial legacy. This is why, in ça va, ça va, on continue, fiction not only reflects on how Angola’s history and liberation process has been remembered, but also on what it entails to create new representation and, therefore, on Abbonenc’s position as an activist filmmaker. How should we rewrite the parts of History that have been concealed? And, more importantly, who should do it?