Dream Palaces • Black Cinema Spaces

In 2021, the Lagos-based Monangambee film collective (Alicia Abieyuwa Bergamelli, Chrystel Oloukoï, Dara Omotoso, Ese Emmanuel) learned that the historic Eyethu Cinema (1969-1990s), derelict for decades, was to be converted into a shopping mall. Eyethu (“ours” in isiZulu) was one of the first Black cinemas in the Soweto township of Johannesburg, created in the wake of the forced removal of Black urban residents from the once vibrant and cosmopolitan Sophiatown. More than a cinema, it functioned as a community center. Eyethu’s fate mirrors that of many other Black cinemas worldwide, left vacant, forced to close, burnt down, reconverted into churches, parking lots, shopping malls... Only a handful managed to survive racialized and neoliberal urban policies, monopolistics shifts in the industry, costly equipment maintenance and technological adaptations, changes in consumption and leisure patterns, renovation costs, and other challenges. 

Dream Palaces is a worldwide digital research, mapping and curatorial project on cinemas across the Black world. The project illuminates the pasts and futures of Black cinema spaces, situating them within broader Black urban histories across the globe, the shifting meanings of spectatorship and assembly in a global neoliberal present, and the collective futures still being dreamed of, in renovated or new Black cinema spaces.