Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa

Continental Rifts makes two clear interventions. One, imagination in terms of a nostalgic longing and the projection of an idyllic quality to the ‘homeland’ is brought forth through a deconstructive and self-reflexive formal approach in a range of works. This occurs most poignantly in two works by Claudia Cristovao. Installation Fata Morgana includes a series of conversations with persons displaced from Africa who recount memories of the landscape. Their conversational approach serves to situate imagination as an agent in the constitution of postcolonial subjectivity without either reifying or undermining it. Le voyage imaginaire succeeds Fata Morgana. This piece exposes us to the journey of a man of mixed heritage who returns to his birthplace in search of a family treasure buried in haste while his family fled civil war. The piece does not provide resolution on the family treasure, but a web-based interview with the subject recounting his memories and a two-channel, low-resolution video projection plotting the concerned landscape situates the viewer in an in-between space where imagination and situation, memory and desire intermingle. Navigating between these the viewer enters a nomadic space that parallels the subject’s experiences. Berni Searle’s installation, Home and Away also creates a liminal experience. It is composed of two videos projected facing each other. One is shot off the coast of Spain and the other off the coast of Morocco. The work references migration from Africa to Europe. The artist performs in one video where we see her body in the ocean as if suspended and swayed by ocean currents. Shot from a top angle, her body freely enters and exits frame repeatedly. The fluidity so rendered by the work serves in gesturing towards the contingency and arbitrariness of migratory experience, identity and cultural history.

The innovative formal approaches of the works included in Continental Rifts make for a further intervention. While some works like Cristovao’s and Searle’s installations use design, sound and projection quality among other features to evoke a sense of liminality and fluidity in the viewing experience, others such as Yto Barrada’s and Alfredo Jaar’s films adopt a direct, documentarist visual regime to highlight socio-cultural complexities extending out from the colonial encounter and perpetuated by a partial global order of contemporary times. Yto Barrada’s The Botanist is a short film that raises issue with the homogenization rendered by global urbanization. The film focuses on the depletion of native flowers such as the ‘Morrocan Iris’ along the Atlantic coast. The film is structured around a group of visitors who visit an amateur botanist, Umberto Pasti’s garden on the Atlantic coast, south of Tangier. The garden is home of rare and endangered plant species. The film’s cinematography is powerful and subversive. The low angle from which we can only access the visitors’ feet in the garden emphasises the landscape and situates in the film’s conversations a social and historical imperative. The viewer’s attention is directed on the debate within the film from a camera position that undermines the sound conventions in mainstream and institutional documentary practice. The critical stance towards globalisation is not limited to the verbal discourse within the film, but it is embodied by the film’s form that constitutes as a rigorous political gesture within film historically.

The most phenomenal and ambitious work in the exhibition is South African, Georgia Papageorge’s Africa Rifting: Lines of Fire: Namibia/Brazil. In this work, Papageorge boldly returns to the geological formation of the African continent. She focuses on the Gondwanaland split, 135 million years ago, from which South America and Africa were formed. Papageorge’s territory is difficult for in the colonialist discourse, geology functioned close to biological determinism on which racial and civilizational disparities and inequities were grounded. Africa Rifting uses a series of endless red banners flowing very elementally on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia. The elemental and fluid nature of the red banners against a sparse landscape steadily evokes the redness of blood. Combined with a minimal soundscape the piece catapults the concepts ‘rift’ and ‘blood’ into metaphors of dissociation, fissure and reconciliation — extracting them from the colonial imaginary and re-appropriating them within a postcolonial context. Papageorge states: ‘coming out of a country torn apart by rift, by apartheid… You can find it in the arterial lines that run through each and every one of us, the rift lines that break us apart or create pathways in our lives. The Africa Rifting project extends these concepts. The rift becomes internalized — an extension of the conflict between the physical body and the immortal soul.’

Walking through Continental Rifts one cannot but be struck by the elemental quality of most pieces that resonates with some biological category or the other, say blood, fluid or fauna. The colonial discourse was founded on biological determinism. The works in Continental Rifts evoke and reposition biological metaphors using them to gesture towards the indeterminacy, contingency and contiguity embedded in human relations among themselves and in their interaction with cultural landscapes.