Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Francois Knoetze, Russel Hlongwane, Amy Louise Wilson

Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness

Vidéo expérimentale | mp4 | couleur | 8:23 | Afrique du sud | 2023

Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness is a creative research project by South African artists Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson. In fabricating a fictional institute and its archive, the artists explore and imagine vernacular technological practices operating across the African continent. An intertextual conversation between the documentary and the poetic, the video operates as an in-house media assemblage created for the preservation of the institute’s activities and ideas. The project aims to foreground indigenous technological knowledge and to explore how science, technology and innovation are part of a long interlinked process of accumulative knowledge production which extends long into the past. The work builds on the field of technopolitical research to formulate a multi-scalar history and future of technological creativity. Positioning the triumphs and failures of the everyday in the future-oriented technoscientific, the work unfolds the idea of development as a historical process Africans shaped.

Russel Hlongwane works in the production and assembly of culture. His area of interest is in heritage, tradition and modernity in South Africa. He moves between art-making (installation and film) and curating. His performance work operates as a bridge to transmit his academic interest to a broader audience, while his writing practice moves between academia, policy and art journals. His most recent peer reviewed paper is titled ‘Transcendental Technologies, Mother Tongues and Space (2022). He works intentionally with language (isiZulu) as a way to mobilise ideas contained in supressed histories. His work, Ifu Elimnyama (The Dark Cloud) has featured in six exhibitions and won the Sharjah Film Platform Jury Award. He curated the Bristol based Cntrl Shift Network festival that featured filmic works from the global south confronting the relationship between technology and the continent. Lo-Def Film Factory (Francois Knoetze & Amy Louise Wilson) is a DIY art duo who work across archival research, dramaturgy and visual strategies with video art, collage, sculptural installation and virtual reality. The duo aims to create a space for storytelling through the democratization of filmmaking via video by and for underrepresented communities across Southern Africa. They run workshops and work with various communities, placing value on the transmission ideas and lived experience over high production values. Their VR experience and research project The Subterranean Imprint Archive explores the legacy of technologies used in the extraction of mineral resources in Central and Southern Africa. It has been shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, University of African Futures (France), MUTEK Montreal and the Geneva International Film Festival. Amy and Francois have exhibited at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, The Centre Pompidou, The Dakar Biennale and the Akademie Der Kunste, Berlin.