Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin who is interested in the porous boundaries between the moving image and its reception, the fictional dimensions of the documentary, and the economics, politics, and poetics inherent in filmmaking.

Many of César’s experimental films have focused on resistance in Portugal’s geopolitical past, questioning mechanisms of history production and proposing spaces for performing subjective knowledge. César has been researching the origins of cinema in Guinea-Bissau, its imaginaries and potencies, developing that research into the collective project Luta ca caba inda (The Struggle Is Not Over Yet).

Quantum Creole is an experimental documentary film of collective research on creolization, addressing its historical, ontological, and cultural forces. Referring to the minimum physical entity in any interaction—quan­tum—the film utilizes different imaging forms to read the subversive potential of weaving as Creole code. While the punch-card technology designed for the textile loom was fundamental for the development of the computer, binary code is closer to the ancient act of weaving than to that of writing. West African Creole people wove coded messages of social and political re­sistance into textiles, countering the colonists’ languag­es and technologies. Encoded messages of resistance transcend the simple restructuring and recoding of the

languages of the colonizer and the colonized, and thus it is important to investigate the “textile” nature of texts in today’s digital world as well as the way in which creole can be encoded and understood as a way of thinking about (and being in) the world, that extends beyond the sphere of language.

César premiered her first feature-length essay-film, Spell Reel, at the Forum section of the 67th Berlinale (2017). Selected exhibitions and screenings have taken place at: Tabakalera, San 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010); Manifesta 8, Cartagena (2010); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011–15); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2012); Khiasma, Paris (2011–2015); Kunstwerke, Berlin (2013); SAAVY Contemporary, Berlin (2014–15); Tensta konsthall, Spånga (2015); Mumok, Vienna (2016); Contour 8 Biennial, Mechelen (2017); Gasworks, London (2017); and MoMA, New York (2017).