An image may bear witness to history, but it needs a storyteller to give it context.

John Akomfrah

Through a radical re-articulation of the historical archive with testimonial memory, the films of the Black Audio Film Collective disclose the intersecting constellations of the past and present, where memory is to be understood not as a dead past waiting to be excavated but as a product of the present. What emerges is the possibility of rethinking black subjectivities through the reinvention of storytelling whose passing [Walter] Benjamin had so lamented.

Jean Fisher in Ghosts of Songs

Only when lions have historians will hunters cease to be heroes.

John Matshikiza, director of the Goree Institute in Senegal

Le passé est le même que l’étranger, ce n’est pas une question de distance, c’est la passage d’une frontière.

Chris Marker, Le Dépays

I have no memory of coffins.

Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

There are other worlds out there they never told you about.

Sun Ra

The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.

William Faulkner

If we lose the ruins, nothing will be left.

Zbigniew Herbert