Welcome to our online and IRL moving image strand which celebrates little seen archival works and supports engagement with new work across experimental moving image practice.  Regular screenings at our Birmingham venue will facilitate critical discussion and education. Selected programmes will also be available online through our Vimeo channel.

VIDEOTHEQUE

15-17 May 2025 | 12-5PM

Vivid Projects is working towards a new ‘videotheque’ resource, which we hope will provide a lasting framework for our archive. Drawing initially from materials from 1982-2000, the archive reveals a powerful narrative of creative resistance, community organising, and cultural expression during two decades of significant political change. The materials have become a rich source of inspiration for artists working today – in particular the flourishing of different voices that emerged through community video and the independent workshop movement. 

For Flatpack 2025 we are pleased to present a significant work from the 1980s, alongside a new work in progress. African Oasis (1982) is one of a trio of films made by Birmingham based Yugesh Walia which highlight aspects of Black and Asian culture in 80’s Britain – the others being Mirror Mirror (1980) and Sweet Chariot (1981). In 2024 Walia presented the Vivid Projects archive with new digital masters of these important films. 

African Oasis (1982) 32:00 Digital transfer from film,  sound, colour

Directed by Yugesh Walia and produced by Birmingham Film Workshop. 

Yugesh Walia 

It’s good talking to people who see the film now and see things in it that perhaps I never saw when making it. I kind of get it now when people tell me. In those days it was just instinctive, it wasn’t written down, there was nothing like that. We didn’t know how to make a documentary. We just went out there with a camera and started filming. 

We were learning on the go, an interview with Yugesh Walia by Cathy Wade, 2020.

“A culture needs a centre”

These are the opening words of African Oasis, spoken by Derrick Anderson. African Oasis is a documentary exploring the former Handsworth Cultural Centre in Birmingham. The centre was a community based cultural project initially set up as the Handsworth Alternative Scheme (HAS) with Home Office funding, to assist the probation service in finding alternatives to custody for young Black offenders from the Handsworth area. Within a few years, the Centre moved on from being an after-care facility to an oasis of cultural activity for Handsworth’s Black community. The film includes interviews with centre users including Kokuma Dance Company and the centre’s visionary founder, Bob Ramdhanie.

Yugesh Walia in 2009:

“What the workshop did was to provide me with a crucial umbrella of support. I was the only Asian filmmaker around at that time. There were absolutely no opportunities at the beginning of the 1980s for Asian filmmakers.  It was my first documentary, produced by BFVW – and after seeing this, and following a strong pitch from BFVW, Alan Fountain at C4 franchised the Workshop. 

“My first film, Mirror Mirror, the success it had, was pivotal in BFVW gaining support and momentum, and BFVW went on to win several commissions from C4. I subsequently made two bigger budget dance films for C4; and the C4 diversity remit did benefit Endboard early on. We (Yugesh and brother Sunandan) established Endboard Productions in 1985.’

Gary Stewart 16-17 May

Following a performative reading on 15 May, we will be sharing artist Gary Stewart’s current research with Vivid Projects, which draws from archives, conversations and workshops in Handsworth and Northfield community libraries earlier this year. Born in  Birmingham and now London-based, Stewart is a multidisciplinary artist known for his work reworking archives and collections with Trevor Mathison as Dubmorphology. Over the past year he has been working with Vivid Projects on We Did It Together, building an archival collage from a series of conversations in community libraries across the city.