Act of Recovery (Part I), Nouakchott, Mauritania
Archival colour pigment print, 20 x 26”, 2016
Untitled (Distance) Cap Spartel, Morocco
Archival colour pigment print, 40 x 50”, 2016
The Shop
Single channel video, HD, 5:27 mins, 2016
This short moving image work examines intra-African migrancy, and the correlation between conditions of film and forms of labour. The subject of the film is Michael, a young man from Benin who lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria. The film was produced in the tailor shop where Michael plies his trade daily.
The Shop confronts geopolitical issues of African subjects residing in globalization’s shadows while putting strategies of documentary films into question. The work challenges conventions of visual representation by calling to attention the limits of vision and how it can (mis)register information. Facticity and specificity are not negated rather they are interweaved within imaginary registers of the image. The blurring of backgrounds, tightly cropped frames capture the play of light and colour resulting in an evocation of the incidental and fleeting moments that characterize any space. The opacity of the images-fields of darkness-make apparent light as a necessary condition for film while signaling an image’s inability to capture the “truth” of a subject.