Black Code/Code Noir

In a spellbinding, textural blend of 16mm and HD video, Ana Vaz refracts the colonial history of Brazil and Portugal through objects, gestures, and contemporary customs.

Reflecting on the legacy of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, "Ouvertures" follows a collective’s process of translating Édouard Glissant’s play Monsieur Toussaint from French to Creole.

The lighthouse, as a man-made object built to shed light into the dark unknown, encapsulates perfectly the desires of the Enlightenment project of modernity: the domination of nature through reason and intellect, the advancement of technology and trade on a global scale, the illuminatory transparency of European Christian morality – a beacon in the dark. This 'op-film' will be a disorienting and disoccidenting dérive from optical navigation to algorithms of locating – an essay against the grain of Western patterns of referencing and situating. From a film made with lenses and ensitive celluloid to the desktop locating engine, we will navigate from the material production of Fresnel lenses to the invention of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) – the tool that announces the obsolescence of the lighthouse.

As technological progress pushes forward in the overdeveloped world, enormous piles of obsolete computers are thrown away and recycled. Pushed out of sight and sent to the coast of West Africa these computers end up in waste grounds such as Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana. On arrival the e-waste is recuperated by young men, who break and burn the plastic casings in order to extract the precious metals contained within. Eventually the metals are sold, melted and reformed into new objects to be sold – it is a strange system of recycling, a kind of reverse neocolonial mining, whereby the African is searching for mineral resources in the materials of Europe. Through showing these heavy processes, the video highlights the importance of dispelling the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology to reveal the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins.

In the year of his death, my great-uncle, the artist Nigel Henderson, wrote a letter addressed to my future self. In his letter, he asked me to decipher a painting he made of the fossilized cliffs at Walton on the Naze in Essex, in the east of England. As a clue, he sent me a photocopied manuscript of ​the novel “The Fourbanks of the River of Space” by ​the South American novelist Wilson Harris, who lived nearby. Afterthoughts of a Walk on the Naze is ​a​ quantum fiction that attempts to ​answer his letter. I revisit the house and studio where he made the painting and film the surrounding seascape/riverscape and the cliffs the painting references. Harris’ book, the landscapes and the painting work together in counterpoint, revealing ideas about artistic inheritance, creation, death, weather and time.

A materialist and animist critique of European colonial history, reading the past as something entangled within the present, made up of living and dead elements. The Sea is History, made in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, is a free adaptation of the poem by Derek Walcott