Space Afrika and Valentin Noujaim on ‘The Dark Wood’, a journey through Manchester where Dante’s Inferno meets gentrification, memory, analogue film and the ghosts of a working-class past.
12 August 2026
In ‘The Dark Wood’, Manchester emerges as both a real city and a haunted terrain: a place of warehouses and new towers, remembered routes and disappearing histories. Created by Space Afrika and filmmaker Valentin Noujaim, the exhibition takes Dante’s Inferno as a loose point of departure, transforming its descent through circles of hell into a nocturnal passage through the shifting class geographies of a post-industrial city.
Bringing together Noujaim’s 35mm film Opera Omnia with sound, dialogue and installation, the work resists a single narrative or fixed way through. Instead, images and voices surface, disappear and return, asking what a city remembers as its physical fabric is remade—and whose histories remain audible amid accelerating change. In this conversation, the collaborators discuss Manchester as a living archive, analogue film as an unstable vessel for memory, listening as an act of witnessing, and the possibilities that emerge when cinema, sound and architecture are allowed to speak together.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: ‘The Dark Wood’ draws on Dante’s Inferno, yet the exhibition never settles into a straightforward literary adaptation. What drew you to Dante as a framework for thinking about the contemporary city, and where did you depart from the original text?
Dante came in through listening, not through wanting to adapt him: hearing Josh and Joshua tell the story of the Manchester they grew up in gave us the image of a night journey through a fogged-in city, caught between paradise and hell, and Inferno was the closest shape for that. What we kept was the structure: descent, passage, return, not the theology; there’s no Virgil, no sins matched to punishments. The departure happens almost immediately: the ghosts in the film aren’t damned souls; they’re echoes of Manchester’s own history, the city where Marx and Engels lived and wrote, now watching its working-class past erased as factories become towers. The circles of hell became something closer to circles of class. Inferno gave us a route in, not a script to follow.
Manchester is not just a backdrop; it pulses as a living archive, shaped by memory, absence, and layered histories. How did you navigate the city as both a tangible landscape and an emotional terrain, and what secrets does it reveal that another place could not?
As Manchester is myself and Josh’s hometown, we have a distinct connection to its culture and history. Not having lived in the city for almost seven years, in that time period the city has gone through a level of gentrification and transformation affecting its routes and architecture, which made it feel unfamiliar at times. However, there are still remnants and fragments of a past on the outskirts and within the cobbled streets. A sort of sonic and ghost-like energy of those that came before us. It is a story which can feel familiar to those growing up in post-industrial cities. As a project between us and this connection from our shared histories, we were able to highlight those particular narratives with a level of sensitivity and inclusion and highlight the active acceleration of change within Manchester and the emotional impact.
The exhibition unfolds across film, dialogue and sound, with no single element dominating the experience. How did your collaboration evolve between image and composition, and what did each of you relinquish to create a genuinely shared language?
We benefit from learning and spending time studying each other prior to the creation of Opera Omnia. By operating solemnly from a space where each component is as vital as the other, informing and elevating the other in constant conversation. It’s important to value the strength of parts and potential we all bring to the table; across the main components mentioned, but also the silences and spontaneous, carefully and mutually examining the spectrum of conversation; addressing the practical requirements for the exhibition to function, whilst considering emotion, vulnerability of work, and the movement/space between each part. Striking the balance between each of these elements led to a most effective offering. I think in a lot of ways, your observation describes an accurate reflection of the discourse between us as creators, collaborators and friends, recognising our roles and ability, approaching the shared work with great respect and potential. There is constant communication and trust on both sides to articulate and complement the administered response, openly sharing ideas and setting boundaries yet allowing things to arrive innately and become what they decide to be; trusting the amalgam.
Opera Omnia was shot on 35mm, a medium that carries its own material history and temporal weight. What role did the physicality of analogue film play in shaping the work’s meditation on recurrence, disappearance and memory?
For us, 35mm was never a nostalgia move; it’s a way of building images that carry their own decay into the film. Grain, light leaks, the chemical instability of the stock become part of the material, so the image is already something eroding as you watch it, close to how memory actually works: it fades, repeats, comes back distorted rather than fixed. The format also lets us go deep into darkness without losing the image; digital black tends to flatten into nothing, but 35mm holds matière even in its darkest passages, so you get variations within the dark itself rather than a single void. That mattered for a film about a night journey: the dark had to have depth and texture, not be empty. We wanted the format itself to hold the same tension as the story, a medium that is disappearing being used to picture a city whose working-class history is also disappearing. Mixing it with 16mm and surveillance footage lets the film move between registers of time; some images feel found, others remembered, others monitored, so recurrence isn’t just in the narrative, it’s built into the texture of the film itself.
Throughout the installation, voices seem to surface, fade, and return, while sound becomes a means of navigating spaces that cannot always be seen. How do you understand listening as a form of witnessing in places marked by layered histories and social transformation?
I think that cities naturally carry and produce their own sonics, but they are also infiltrated and dispersed by noise. When thinking about how voices can literally be shut out from conversations in terms of political engagement and who has access, sound and composition are a way to represent that process. In this, we wanted to ensure that these voices appear as points of memory or reference to be brought back to life, to honour them and let them know they have not been forgotten. I think sound in itself has links to memory and can create different possibilities and new forms of meaning when being presented in a different space.
Instead of following a linear narrative, ‘The Dark Wood’ draws viewers into a realm of drift, repetition, and uncertainty. What new possibilities arise when audiences dwell in ambiguity rather than chase resolution?
We wanted to create an open-ended space where each person could arrive with a unique entry point or travel through and leave with a route different to the next individual – no strict starting point or required flow through each of the install elements and no limit on the time that could be spent. Playing with the timing of the film vs soundpiece and the overlapping speech and also the mood with blue filter , we hoped to create a liminal zone with slower movement between the works, encouraging time spent engaging, returning to an element to fully explore or question it until feeling resolved. With the soundscape in the circular seated room, we were completely open to any form of interaction in that space, whether that be with the soundpiece itself or the individuals with each other while also contemplating the room’s reflection of scenery in the film. Each section of the install aimed for one to sit in the unresolved tension of its offering and neither held any exclusive or definite meaning, and I think this allows ideas to linger, giving power to the audience and transforming them as co-creators / contributors to the work.
Both of your practices often explore the relationship between architecture, atmosphere and lived experience. In ‘The Dark Wood’, how does the built environment become an active participant rather than simply the setting in which events unfold?
For both of us, architecture is a source of inspiration and a source of emotion in equal measure; we gain from it, and we suffer from it. In ‘The Dark Wood’, Manchester isn’t a backdrop for the walk; it’s what’s actually being walked through and pressed against: warehouses, empty lots, towers going up where factories used to be. The city holds memory the way a body does; it carries the trace of who built it and who’s being pushed out of it now. So the built environment acts almost like a character with its own logic, its own pull, sometimes protective, sometimes threatening, and the two figures in the film are responding to it more than moving through it. The sound does the same work; Space Afrika’s composition doesn’t just accompany the images; it gives the architecture a voice, a kind of breathing, so the city isn’t described from the outside; it’s felt from inside its own accumulation of histories.
Across your respective practices, there is an ongoing interest in how memory persists through spaces, bodies and collective experience. Looking beyond ‘The Dark Wood’, how does collaborative practice expand your understanding of what cinema and sound installation can hold that either medium alone cannot?
Each of these specific disciplines takes on a new form of communication when in dialogue with each other by effectively bringing about a different experience which operates to counter each limitation within its own field. In terms of the sensory reception, each of these things cannot be heightened alone, and so thinking about how to tell a story or accurately represent the sum of the parts allows for more flexibility and challenges the notion of what these disciplines mean. By working together, we get to understand each other’s processes, how things can be viewed differently, reconceptualised and how artistic disciplines and ideas are interconnected. It’s something that is an integral part of all our practices.
This exhibition was on view at ICA London from 6 until 14 June 2026.
