Working across film, writing, music, pedagogy, and community-based practices, Kivu Ruhorahoza and Christian Nyampeta have each developed bodies of work attentive to the aftermath of historical rupture and to the fragile processes through which communities reassemble over time. 

Inspired by ‘Spirits’, a poem by the Senegalese poet and philosopher Birago Diop, Whispers captures scenes of daily life in Dakar: gestures, textures, sounds, and fleeting encounters. Echoing Diop’s invitation to ‘listen more often to things than beings’, the work cultivates a mode of attention attuned to the unseen. The film turns towards material and immaterial presences: wind moving through trees, the resonance of voices, the density of objects, and the sense of time carried by streets and coastlines. In doing so, it centres a question latent in the poem: when does an ancestor escape their descendants to become the ancestor of all?

By attending to the elements that carry and transmit across generations, the film traces a spectral kinship that extends beyond the human, understanding the world as an unfinished, inhabited relation, continuously shaped by those who came before and those yet to arrive.