Catalogue > At random

In 1904, Ësáasi Eweera, the last native Bubi leader who opposed the Spanish rule at the current island of Bioko (Equatorial Guinea) was detained by colonial guards and forcefully taken to Santa Isabel, the colony's capital. Imprisoned and fatally wounded, Ësáasi Eweera died three days later. His home village was burned down and most of its inhabitants disappeared. An incomplete record of those events is classified in Spain's General Administration Archive. File by file, handwritten reports and letters show several accounts of what allegedly happened and expose the progressive operations of concealment carried out by colonial institutions. Meanwhile, some native oral accounts have survived and opposed Spanish official version, confronted the permanent risk of oblivion and attempted to contribute to a sort of emancipated collective memory. By reenacting written texts through voiceovers, taping and studying native Bubi oral accounts and identifying historically charged sites, A storm was coming tries to reflect on the gaps, silences, contradictions and falsehoods that colonial history is usually built upon.

Javier Fernández Vázquez is a filmmaker, anthropologist and visual culture researcher. In 2007 he directed his first short film Señales de Indiferencia / Marks of Indifference, which received the award to the best international short film in the Valdivia International Film Festival (Chile). In 2008, he founded with Luis López Carrasco and Natalia Marín Sancho the experimental and documentary film collective, Los Hijos. Their first feature-length film, Los materiales / The Materials (2010), won the Jean Vigo award to the best direction in Punto de Vista Pamplona International Film Festival 2010 and a special mention in FID Marseille 2010. Their next feature-length films as well as several shorts and video installations were selected by international film festivals and exhibited in contemporary art centres. Their work has also received special retrospective sections in Mar del Plata International Film Festival (Argentina) or Distrital (Mexico). In 2015, Javier Fernández Vázquez began an academic career in Film Studies and Visual Culture that has led him to research on issues related to history, memory, colonialism, visual culture and object theory. Anunciaron tormenta / A storm was coming (2020) is his first solo feature-length film. It was premiered at Berlinale Forum 2020.