Martina Attille

Martina Attille was a collective member of Sankofa Film & Video (London, UK), founded in 1983 with Maureen Blackwood, Robert Crusz, Nadine Marsh-Edwards and Isaac Julien. Attille is currently developing her thesis on the onscreen performativity of British black women in avant-garde films, at University of the Arts London, a project made possible by an award from TECHNE AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership from 2018-2021.

Attille’s collective contributions to Sankofa Film & Video included Black Women & Representation (London, 1984) a discussion forum produced with Women in Synch, hosted by Four Corners and organized by women from a range of media communities, and Black (feminine): Exploring Images of Black Women (London, 1986), a film production workshop promoting access to filmmaking resources for women. Sankofa Film & Video and Black Audio Film Collective screened videos and tape-slides at an exhibition of work by artist Sonia Boyce at Air Gallery (London, 1986-1987). Soon after, Boyce accepted an invitation to contribute to the development of Dreaming Rivers (1988), working closely with Attille to extend the themes of the original script 'Image Imagery'. As a result, Boyce produced for the studio shoot of Dreaming Rivers two sets/installations of meticulously displayed objects to evoke the contextualising narrative of Miss T. and her family; a bedroom and a living room.

In celebration of 20 years after the release of Dreaming Rivers, the film was presented at the sixty-eighth annual convention of The College Language Association (Re) Roots and (Re) Routes: Transatlantic Connections in Language and Literature in a Special Session organised by Dr. Antonio D. Tillis (2008, Charleston, South Carolina). Dreaming Rivers endures as a meditative work on migration and dislocation, an allegory that ‘illustrates the spirit of modern families touched by the experience of migration’. The protagonist Miss T. (Corinne Skinner Carter) is in part constructed out of research interviews with first-generation female Caribbean migrants, who settled in England in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The visualization of Miss T. is also informed by the iconic arrangement of the female form in works by British artists Simone Alexander, Claudette Johnson and Marlene Smith. Subsequent to the making of Dreaming Rivers, in the early 1990s, Attille accepted an invitation to teach at the University of California San Diego Visual Arts Department, and an invitation to collaborate with artist Sonia Boyce on the project ‘I’m Almost Blushing’, a sitespecific installation devised with students, for the Mary Lou Williams Center at Duke University Durham.

Attille participated in dialogue with her peers working in the visual arts sector through the forum, Black Women Artists Study Group (1995-1997) and contributed to publications including The Fact of Blackness: Franz Fanon and Visual Representation (1996) and Rhapsodies in Black: the Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997). Her presence within the visual arts community has been documented in artworks produced by artists Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid and Ingrid Pollard.

Born in Saint Lucia, before its full independence from colonial rule in 1979, Attille has lived in London since 1961. She graduated from Goldsmiths College University of London in 1983 and entered independent media practice later that year, as a trainee production assistant, working on three programmes for Visions, a documentary series for Channel Four Television on world cinema, produced by Large Door, founded by John Ellis, Keith Griffiths and Simon Hartog.