Location: Switzerland; Language: French; Captions: English

A group of Black filmmakers and actors are reenacting the board meeting of a community cinema. A letter of complaint has been addressed to the cinema. It revives the tensions about the appropriate behavior towards a group of Black men who occupies the lobby of the building during the day, while the cinema is showing a film about the situation of these undocumented workers. This letter is asking how the institution is really committed to social change beyond the films they screen?

An excerpt from Eric Golo Stone on Framer Framed:

Ramaya Tegegne’s experiential research centers around the conflicting role art institutions maintain when they promote claims to anti-racism while actively engaging in the management of racial inequalities. It is this disconnect between a declarative politics and the actualized material politics that Tegegne recognizes as being particularly pervasive in the arts sector. This disconnect is amplified today by a social uprising that extends from the racial equity demands of individual access and representation to transforming race relations at the systemic level of shared policy and institutional governance. While considering the extent to which racially specific elision and dispossession continue to define the operative structures of art institutions, Tegegne’s work emphasizes how everyday lived relations are directly responsive to these deeply entrenched ongoing historical conditions.

Tegegne’s new film work, Framer Framed, presents a deliberation by the board of directors of an renamed cultural institution in French-speaking Switzerland. This fictional staged board meeting revisits an actual incident that took place in 2019 when a group of Black migrant men were forced to vacate the lobby of a Swiss state-funded cultural institution, which at the time was screening the film No Apologies (2019) about the exclusion and discrimination of Black migrant men in Switzerland. These individuals gathered in the lobby were told to leave by a management employee of the institution who justified the expulsion by stating that the group was loitering and disrupting the experience of patrons attending the screening. For Tegegne, this incident must be recognized within a far-reaching history of loitering and vagrancy laws directed against Black people, as well as the broader history of racialized policing of property and public space. Framer Framed was produced in response to this particular incident.

Captions by Sarya Wu

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Credits

Written and directed by: Ramaya Tegegne

Cast: Ebuka Anokwa, Rokhaya Marieme Balde, Aisla Candelaria, Joseph Kumbela, Ramaya Tegegne

Cinematography: Erika Nieva Da Cunha

Editor & Boom Operator: Gemma Ushengewe

Music & Sound Design: Chienne De Garde

Unit Manager: Yasmine Bahechar

Unit Assistant & Additional Camera: Maya Corboud

Colorist: Delphine Mouly

Sound mixing: Hector Fassa

Additional music: The Queen’s Underwear, Trudie Stopia, The Hunt

Catering: Kebba

Translation, subtitles: Amal Achaibou, Orfeo A. Lili, Lovis Herzig

Production: Privilege, Switzerland

Support: Pour cent culturel Migros, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Canton de Genève, Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, HEAD – Genève