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Indigeneity and Digital Entanglements

Programme of film shorts offering a counter to technology as a western construction by Russel Hlongwane, Dilman Dila, Tabita Rezaire & Francois Knoetze

People sat on benches in a dark space, facing a projected film of a person typing on a computer.

The ruins of history offer a host of unresolved traces that imagine the global south as a site of prehistoric technologies. This programme of short-films offered counter evidence to the assumption that technology is a western construction. The selected films addressed the politics of technology in Africa, affirming the continent as an active agent in the production of technology through indigenous practices.

For Control Shift 2020, these films were presented at Arnolfini, Bristol’s International Centre for Contemporary Arts, and online for the duration of the programme.

Still of Deep Down Tidal (2017) – Tabita Rezaire

Films:


Deep Down Tidal, Tabita Rezaire, South Africa, 2017
A video essay in typical net.art style, weaving together cosmological, spiritual, political and technological narratives about water and its role in communication, then and now.

Ifu Elimnyama: The Dark Cloud, Russel Hlongwane, South Africa, 2019
Set in the year 1220, of the recently decimated metropolis village of The Great Mapungubwe, the film follows an installer flaneur, uMalanje, as he moves curiously across time-space.

Kifaro, Dilman Dila, Uganda, 2020
An African science fiction about a man who visits a diviner to know why his wife doesn’t love him anymore. Science and African divination systems under the framework of technology.

Core Dump, Shenzen, Fracois Knoetze, South Africa, 2019
One of a series of 4 Core Dump films exploring the relationship between digital technology, cybernetics, colonialism and the reenchanted notion of a Non-Aligned Humanist Utopia.

Image credit:
Still of Ifu Elimnyama: The Dark Cloud by Russel Hlongwane
Still of Core Dump by Francois Knoetze
Still of Deep Down Tidal by Tabita Rezaire
Still of Kifaro by Dilman Dila

About the artists

Russel Hlongwane

Russel Hlongwane is a cultural producer and creative industries consultant based in Durban, South Africa. His work obsesses over the tensions in Heritage/ Modernity and Culture/Tradition as it applies to black life. His practice includes cultural research, creative producing, design, film and curatorship. He is part of a number of working groups spread across the Southern African Region, the African continent more broadly and internationally. He has shown work in Munich, Marrakech, Maputo, Karlsruhe, Harare, Bristol, Tokyo as well as throughout South Africa.

Dilman Dila

Dilman Dila, author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories, A Killing in the Sun. Dilman has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2013) and for the Nommo Awards for Best Novella (2017), and long listed for the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition (2014), among other accolades. His short fiction have featured in several anthologies, and his films include What Happened in Room 13 (2007) and The Felistas Fable (2013), which was nominated for Best First Feature by a Director at AMAA (2014).

Tabita Rezaire

Tabita Rezaire, an artist-healer-seeker working with screens and energy streams. Tabita’s cross-dimensional practice envisions network sciences – organic, electronic and spiritual – as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness. Navigating digital, corporeal and ancestral memory as sites of struggles, she digs into scientific imaginaries to tackle the pervasive matrix of coloniality that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Tabita is based in Cayenne, French Guiana.

Francois Knoetze

Francois Knoetze, a Cape Town based performance artist, sculptor and filmmaker known for his sculptural suits and experimental video art. Francois was an Africa Centre Resident and 2016 laureate of the Nafasi Art Space Artist-In-Residence Programme (Dar es Salaam); and attended the OMI International Art Center Residency Programme (New York) in 2017. In 2018 he participated in Cosmopolis 1.5: Enlarged Intelligence (Chengdu) hosted by the Pompidou Centre, as well as Digital Imaginaries – Africas in Production at ZKM, Germany. In 2019 his work was exhibited at the Pompidou Centre as part of Cosmopolis #2. He is a recipient of Hivos’ Digital Earth Fellowship 2019.

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