Martina (Judah) Attille was born in Castries, St Lucia in 1959 and graduated from Goldsmiths College, London in 1983. She subsequently established the Sankofa Film and Video Collective with Maureen Blackwood, Robert Crusz, Isaac Julien and Nadine Marsh-Edwards; co-organised Black Women & Representation (1984) and Black (feminine) - Exploring Images of Black Women (1986), and wrote and directed Dreaming Rivers (1988), an allegory of intergenerational, transnational belonging. Attille is currently researching onscreen British black female avant-garde performativity through her AHRC TECHNE PhD project, 'Africandescence', at the University of the Arts London.
Filmmaker Martina (Judah) Attille was born in Castries, St Lucia in 1959. Aged two she immigrated with her family to England and has lived in London since 1961. Between 1971 and 1977 she attended Our Lady’s Convent High School for Girls and in 1983 she graduated from Goldsmiths College, University of London where she produced her first film, By Any Other Name (1983). She subsequently undertook a six-month placement with independent production company, Large Door, training with production manager, Janine Marmot on three programmes for Visions, a documentary series about world cinema for Channel Four Television.
Attille was one of five co-founders of Sankofa Film & Video Collective with Maureen Blackwood, Robert Crusz, Isaac Julian, and Nadine Marsh-Edwards. Between 1983 and 1988 she co-organised numerous projects including For Black Women by Black Women: Black Women and Representation in collaboration with Women in Sync (Four Corners, 1984), the peer-to-peer public seminar, Power and Control (London, 1985) and the peer-to-peer 16mm film production workshop Black (feminine) – Exploring Images of Black Women (various London venues, 1986). She later reflected that, ‘the workshops offered the chance to have some autonomy over what we created. In addition to this, there were certain experiences – certain histories that hadn't really been talked about in the British context – which we could begin to talk about. In forming as Black groups, we identified our specificity in terms of race and other issues of interest such as gender and sexuality’ (Martina Attille quoted in Coco Fusco, Young British and Black, 1988, p. 33). Attille also worked as a producer, while developing her skills in script editing, on the Collective’s first feature film, The Passion of Remembrance (1986) before writing and directing Dreaming Rivers (1988), her seminal contribution to Sankofa Film & Video. In this allegorical work, actor Corinne Skinner Carter performs the role of Miss T, a black Caribbean woman, and ‘a subject in the process of migration, in the midst of the journey’ (Martina Attille, in Coco Fusco, Young British and Black, p. 39). In Attille’s words Miss T is a ‘colonial subject relocated physically, but psychically connected to that past homeland. She is caught between […] leaving the Caribbean to come to England – for dreams, for hope, for love. And then not realizing some of those ambitions, she is caught in the stormy sea, in the Atlantic, on the way back to a place of security, past happiness of youth’ (Martina Attille in Coco Fusco, pp. 37-39). Attille describes Dreaming Rivers as 'an allegory of intergenerational, transnational belonging' which illustrates the spirit of modern families touched by the experience of migration (Martina Attille, Tate website). Performances by actors Corinne Skinner-Carter, Angela Wynter, Nimmy March, Roderick Hart and Stefan Kalipha inhabit a transformational environment created by sets designed by artist Sonia Boyce and a computer-generated soundscape by composer Shirley Thompson.
Active in international public debate to promote the Collective’s practice, Attille notably contributed to artist and writer Coco Fusco’s touring exhibition Young British and Black (Hallwalls/Contemporary Arts Centre, Buffalo, New York, 1988) which showed works from the Sankofa Film & Video Collective as well as the Black Audio Collective. Inspired by her work with Maureen Blackwood and Nadine Marsh-Edwards on Black Womxn & Representation (1984) and Black (feminine) (1986), she continued to focus on the representational strategies of black women alongside her peers in the visual arts forum, Black Women Artists Study Group (1995–97). In 1999 she enrolled at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London (1999–2000).
Attille has contributed installations, images and essays to exhibitions and art publications including, Smile for Mirage: Enigmas of Race Difference and Desire (ICA, 1995), Smile #2 for The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation (1996), Still, in Rhapsodies in Black: The Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997), Saint Michael Stewart (1994), in Today I shall judge nothing that occurs, Lyle Ashton Harris (2017) and ©2021(gold) commissioned for the Tate Britain Display and research publication, Works from Tate’s Collection: Ima-Abasi Okon (2021). Attille’s enquiry into the performativity of British black women captured on film is ongoing and is the subject of her AHRC TECHNE PhD research project, Africandescence (2018–22), at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. It has also contributed to her curation of a film programme and podcast, Sonic Register: British black women and onscreen performativity for Sheffield International Documentary Festival 2021 Retrospective, Films belong to those who need them – fragments from the history of Black British Cinema. In the same year her work featured in Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s–Now, Tate Britain (2021). Her presence within the visual arts community is documented by her peers, including Sunil Gupta in his photo series for Sankofa Film & Video (1986), in Ingrid Pollard’s, Self-Evident (1995), in Sonia Boyce’s, The Devotional Wallpaper (2008) and in Lubaina Himid’s, Thin Black Line(s): Moments and Connections (2015). Martina Attille lives and works in London, England. Her work in held in the UK in the LUX Collection (LUX has evolved from The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC), founded in 1966 as part of 1960s London counter-culture).
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Martina Attille]
Publications related to [Martina Attille] in the Ben Uri Library