Oceanic Revolutions: Two Refusals… by Suneil Sanzgiri

A storm brews in the middle of the Indian Ocean, its waves crashing against a solitary shoal of rock. The narrator softly recalls a recurring dream—images of her mother’s hair, crashing waves and angry dark storm clouds over the Sunchi Reef—as she asks “Adamastor, why would you spare them? Why leave their path open?” The documented and constructed, animated and distorted, crash together into a dream-like state that stretches time, memory and history towards incomplete imaginaries of revolution. 

Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?, 2023) is a dual-channel film installation by Suneil Sanzgiri, currently on display as a part of his ongoing solo exhibition, Here the Earth Grows Gold at the Brooklyn Museum. Two Refusals is the third film in an ongoing exploration by Sanzgiri into the past and postcolonial refusals in Goan history. The film interweaves 16mm footage shot in Goa, Mumbai, Lisbon and Sagres in Portugal with altered archival footage, snippets from anticolonial films, CGI animation, and a poetic narrative written by Sham-e-Ali Nayeem. The thirty-four-minute film is divided into eight parts, framed as a long-winded dream of our unnamed protagonist. As she tosses and turns in a fitful sleep, the film reflects on the long histories of anticolonial resistance, from its existence in epic narratives to present-day testimonies with fighters in the Goan and Angolan liberation movements. 

The trans-oceanic vision of solidarity envisioned in the film opens with a reference to Adamastor, a mythical creature from the Portuguese epic poem Os Lusíadas (The Lusiadas, 1572) by Luís de Camões, which is also the title of the first chapter in the film. The poem dramatises the journey of Vasco da Gama’s searoute to India; Adamastor, a monstrous creation, fashions storm clouds to destroy da Gama’s ship but ultimately fails to do so. The film opens with this failure before recentring the different afflictions within these intermingled visions of solidarity. Adamastor and mapping the film’s CG-animated Sunchi Reef become important sign points within the film, as it presents the interconnected histories of colonisation and resistance. We hear the testimonies of carceral brutality and police violence from Sharada Sawaikar, who was a Goan liberation fighter jailed at the age of seventeen. Her experiences are embodied in a song she sings, but also in her bodily frailty, weakened due to the sheer violence that she suffered during her incarceration. 

The film also features a conversation with Edgar Valles, the brother of Angola-born Goan revolutionary Sita Valles, who was prominent in the Communist radical politics of the 1970s, following the liberation of Angola from the Portuguese colonial government. Valles was presumably incarcerated and killed following accusations of an attempted coup d’état organised by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA against the government of Agostinho Neto on 27 May 1977. As recounted by Edgar Valles, Sita was accused, along with her husband, of participating in the “political coup” and disappeared, after Cuban troops joined forces with the Angolan state troops to open fire on the demonstrators.

Sanzgiri intersperses the histories and testimonies of Valles and Sawaikar with excerpts from films that both dramatise and document the anticolonial resistances across Goa, Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. We see snippets from Saat Hindustani (Seven Indians, 1968) by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas; Sambizanga (1971) by Sarah Maldoror; Mueda, Memória e Massacre (Mueda, Memory and Massacre, 1979) by Ruy Guerra; and Mortu Nega (1988) by Flora Gomes. Along with invoking the filmic history of these pan-oceanic movements, Two Refusals intervenes with archival footage through manipulations, distortions and sculpturally bending the reel as a visual intervention. About thirty minutes into the film, the narrator-dreamer proclaims, “Liberation is a process.” The declaration is followed by a montage of news and archival footage that is spliced into parts resembling strips of reels, physically and materially stretching the geographic and temporal within the sequence. 

The dream state within the film allows Sanzgiri to stretch the boundaries of the documentary form, its images suspended in water. The dual channel, as a formal device, acts as a dialectic for the various visions and images that come together in the film. In an artistic statement about the film, Sanzgiri states, “Adamastor becomes a way to think through questions of the failures of anti-colonial movements, asking instead, ‘what could have been?’” Two Refusals attempts a visual and speculative exploration into conditions of revolution, beckoning it almost as a natural response to conditions of injustice. Just like the tide rises and falls, the oceanic stretching of memory is as fluid as water, as are the collective revolutions that are present across borders and temporalities.   

To learn more about Suneil Sanzgiri’s practice, read Ankan Kazi’s essays on At Home But Not At Home (2019) and Letter From Your Far-off Country (2020). 

All images are stills from Two Refusals (Would We Recognise Ourselves Unbroken?, 2023) by Suneil Sanzgiri. Images courtesy of the artist.