THE ROOF | What Remains: Echoes of Absence

Like clockwork, the rains return to Mexico City during raining season. The sky opens, the city exhales. Water flows, time stretches, and in this seasonal shift, we begin to transform—discovering new rhythms of breathing and belonging.

This moment echoes through Continuous Dimensional Thorax, the current dual exhibition at THIRD BORN by Sidony O’Neal and Timothy Yanick Hunter. Like nature’s cycles, their work uses repetition and recombination to create temporal ecosystems where displacement sparks new ways of sensing and knowing.

Against this backdrop, THE ROOF presents its second session— What Remains: Echoes of Absence, featuring video works by Crystal Z Campbell and Onyeka Igwe. Both artists work within the unresolved: gaps in the archive, silences in history, bodies missing from dominant narratives. Their films do not restore what is lost, but reimagine what might emerge from absence.

Campbell’s A Meditation on Nature in the Absence of an Eclipse and VIEWFINDER remix the banal and discarded into images charged with quiet urgency. For her, the archive is haunted—an unstable site where the camera listens as much as it sees.

In Igwe’s Specialised Technique and No Archive Can Restore You, the body becomes an archive—vulnerable, rhythmic, and resistant. Her work confronts the architectures of colonial knowledge, tracing what remains when restoration is no longer possible.

Together, Campbell and Igwe invite us to dwell in the aftermath—to witness what has been buried or left unsaid. Their films suggest an archival practice not of preservation, but of reanimation—imagining futures where those never meant to belong might finally find space. Like the rains that renew the earth, their work calls us to embrace cycles of loss and growth, cultivating belonging beyond division in a time when conflict warns us how fragile that belonging can be.

–Oona Zyman

Featured Films

Crystal Z Campbell A Meditation on Nature in the Absence of an Eclipse (2017–2020) Digital Video, 8’12” Running like water, an eclipse streams glimpses of irreversible consequence. Selected Screenings: MoMA (NYC), National Gallery of Art (DC), Flaherty Film Seminar, Cosmic Rays, DocLisboa, and more.

VIEWFINDER (2020) Digital Video, 18’26” Filmed in a Swedish spa town, VIEWFINDER explores belonging, monuments, and political gestures through movement and memory. Selected Screenings: MoMA, DocLisboa, Reassemblage Collective, Squeaky Wheel, Cine Migrante, and others.

Onyeka Igwe Specialised Technique (2018) Digital Video, 7’ Bodies as archives—Igwe examines colonial legacies through embodied knowledge.

No Archive Can Restore You (2020) Digital Video, 5’54” An evocative meditation on archival gaps and the impossibility of full restoration.