AFRIFF: There are familiar patterns in history, events that repeat themselves with little to no variations, circumstances that mothers and daughters will experience and moments that nations will often not learn from. With Lace Relations, these patterns exist on vibrant cotton (stitched together by machines in a small Austrian town) that travelled down to Nigeria, altering the landscape of a culture’s clothing identity.
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Lace Relations ditches the usual style of a documentary and approaches its subject with a unique perspective that makes it stand apart. Starting out in the small idyllic town of Lustenau with its pristine building, vibrant green foliage and quiet people. We meet Grete Bösch who is quietly grappling with a key part of her past: her role in the lace business between Austria and Nigeria. She shares details of her visits to Nigeria to sell lace and how the Austrian government facilitated this later illegal activity. She’s in a place that exists within remorse and stubbornness, and over the course of the documentary you peer into the inner workings of her mind, how her work has come to define her and how a rejection of that is a rejection of herself.
The documentary then goes on to use a sociodrama group to reenact key moments in Grete’s time as a lace importer to Nigeria. It’s a very bare moment, free of the excesses of documentary recreations where actors choreograph real moments as similarly as possible but with no real connection. Here, we have a group of people who discuss each moment after their reenactment. Through this creative choice, we are able to see how their minds work out their country’s past in real time. The multiracial group travels through time from Grete’s visits to Nigeria, to state-sponsored circumventing of Obasanjo’s ban on lace importation and then to times of slavery where textile came at the cost of black bodies.
This travel through time also moves through place as the documentary moves to Lagos from Austria, connecting the two cities for the rest of the film. It introduces us to and follows journalist Ireti Bakare-Yusuf, daughter of Jarin Yusuk-Seriki, the founder of Lagos’ lace market (popularly known as Gota). She is immensely proud of her mother, quick to tell the story of her rise to riches and her influence on the clothing of Lagos parties. It serves as an interesting starting point for the way lace has affected our culture and how differently it affected those in Austria. The documentary doesn’t shy away from the ways consumption can pose as a kind of exploitation— lace has given wealth to a few Nigerians and demolished the local textile industry, but for Austria, it has funded the development of a small town.
The sounds of the documentary play a role in the way the visuals are processed. Lustenau is quiet and its machines are organized, clicking and moving in sync, creating patterns that will find their way to Nigeria. Lagos is noisy—soundtracked by afrobeats—and its lace machines are creaking in a warehouse that looks abandoned, creating lace that is tagged “made in Austria” to satisfy our classist tastes. Directed across those two countries by four women (Anette Baldauf, Chioma Onyenwe, Joana Adesuwa Reiterer and Katharina Weingartner), the distinct styles of each director complements the story the documentary is trying to tell. We have scenes where still shots of large boxes and lace on tables haunt the vibrant colours of lace sections of Lagos markets.
The parts that are set in Lagos often feel like a family-centred documentary, almost losing itself to the subject’s search for every connection to her mother but finds the important colonial connection to Austria later on. At times a fashion evolution documentary, Lace Relations finds patterns in a personal story of remembrance, the colonial violence of textile trade and a country not fully aware of the foreignness of the clothes that define their cultural identity.
Lace Relations screened at the 14th Africa International Film Festival.
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Side Musings
- There’s a shot of some fabric that had Tinubu’s face on it. He once again shows up at AFRIFF in some way.
- Nigerian presidents love banning importation without any logical reasoning.
- In this film they spell it as “Owambe” and it made me chuckle because of the obtuse Twitter conversation that happened earlier this year.
