Esé Emmanuel

Dream Palaces — centers Black cinema spaces across Africa and the diaspora as sites of cultural autonomy and community through mapping, public interventions, and virtual screenings. The project focuses on 1. the materiality and architecture of the “dream palaces” (indoor versus outdoor, brick and mortar vs. mobile vans etc.), 2. the cinematic experience itself (price of entry, ticket design, types of films projected, oral histories by attendees), and 3. the geographies outlined by the cinemas in terms of their localization in specific urban or rural environments, their networks of distribution and relations, and the type of spaces represented on screen.