“Future Tense: Conversations at Manchester Museum” BY Ero Sevan
2023 · color · UK · EN · 22’ · In competition · Swiss Premiere
Future Tense: Conversations at Manchester Museum traces how colonial violence is at the heart of many museum collections across the United Kingdom. Using Manchester Museum as a local case study, the current debate around the restitution and repatriation of looted objects – and how best to reunite communities with their material cultural heritage – comes into focus through the experiences of two individuals; Dr. Njabulo Chipangura, the museum’s Curator of Living Cultures; and Councillor Erinma Bell MBE, a community peace activist and Deputy Lieutenant for Greater Manchester. Chipangura and Bell share their approaches to collaborative community work and their visions for decolonising the future of Manchester Museum’s Africa collection, which remains out of sight in the building’s basement stores. The film features a creative intervention by Manchester-born artist and poet Rochá Dawkins that ties together the museum’s past, present, and future, and approaches the museum as a lively still life in a continuation of Nii-Kwate Owoo’s You Hide Me (1970) and Chris Marker’s Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953).
THE DIRECTOR | ERO SEVAN
Ero Sevan (they/them) is an American artist with a studio background in drawing and painting. After receiving a B.F.A. with honours from the Roski School of Art and Design, they spent 10 years working in galleries, museums, and artist studios across Los Angeles to support projects from the Black and Indigenous Diaspora. They are best known as a senior contributing member of BLKNWS, an ongoing project by the American filmmaker Kahlil Joseph, and as a creative director for the American poet, artist, and scholar Robin Coste Lewis. Sevan received a Master of Arts with distinction in Visual Anthropology at The University of Manchester in 2023.
