Скачать или смотреть 2025 AFNA Shortlist: Valérie Bah

Valérie Bah is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and writer. Part of Les Martiales collective, Bah’s first collection, Les Enragé.e.s, was translated from the French by Kama La Mackerel and published by Metonymy Press as The Rage Letters. Subterrane is their first book in English.

Subterrane

A speculative comedy comprised of a carousel of Black and Queer voices being pushed further underground by urban prosperity.

New Stockholm, a metropolis like any other across North America, is unofficially divided between two worlds. Its upwardly mobile form the centre of its gleaming eye, but their prosperity and affluence are not the focus of Zeynab’s government-funded abstract documentary. Her lens trails to the city’s margins instead, in polluted industrial wastelands such as Cipher Falls, one of New Stockholm’s last affordable neighbourhoods, where creatives and other anti-capitalist voices increasingly find themselves pushed into demeaning, dead-end jobs. In this growing underground network, Zeynab’s lens focuses on the mysterious demise of Doudou Laguerre, whose death may be related to his activism against a construction project.

Subterrane connects us to a constellation of Black and Queer voices, the hair braiders, tattoo artists, holistic healers, weed dealers, and sidewalk horticulturists struggling to make a life in New Stockholm. Together, they illustrate how in cities across the continent, entire communities are being sidelined in the name of prosperity.

(From Esplanade Books/Véhicule Press)