By Jose Ferreira
My interest in the contingent histories of ex-Portuguese colonies began in 1992 on a trip to Mozambique. While travelling in remote areas of that country it was apparent that tribal connections had been severed along partisan lines, and that societies long intact before colonial rule had been fragmented by the Imperial legacies of Portugal. The exhibition and research project 'sulsouth' were initiated as critical platforms to probe questions such as, what are the connections between de-colonisation and the media? In curating an exhibition orientated towards providing a critical/political space relating to postcolonial debates on the contagion of Portuguese culture, it became evident that no single project would tangibly encompass such a broad and generalised anthology of video and film artists.
The exhibition is an attempt to foster a reading of the diversity orchestrated by 'cultural mutation'. It provides a conceptual space to investigate the conjuncture of cultures manifested through de/colonisation, proliferated by the media, and to ponder their residual overlapping commonalties. The emphasis was placed on the social body and its history, inextricably woven into the fabric of society and biased toward the plural notions of identity. Where the influences of one culture have been prejudiced over another, the subaltern histories of the disenfranchised culture are pervasively altered, marginalised and often omitted from the dominant history.
With the redundancy of certain epistemologies framing the colonial picture, debates re-evaluating fixed notions of identity have transformed, distended and augmented our concepts of spatial boundaries. These changes introduced new speculative readings of subaltern histories that were conceded subservient in the past. Within identity discourses, 'culture' has often been maligned and misconstrued by encouraging simplistic idioms of stereotype, mimicry, exoticism and multiple subjectivity. These issues formed the nucleus from which 'sulsouth' hoped to engage the public. In order to avoid the potential reductionist pitfalls of curating such a broadly 'thematic' exhibition, much information was considered: the political movements, revolutionary doctrines, highly defined postcolonial critical writing, artists and the media.
Embryonic anti-colonialist movements between the first and second World Wars created an insurgence of postcolonial theory. This trajectory of 'race' theory initiated around the 1930s was seminal in movements like 'La Revue' in Haiti, 'L' Étudiant Noir', 'Negrismo' in Cuba and the Negro Renaissance in America, inspiring generations of writers, artists and politicians. These influences became evident in insurrections motivated by Almicar Cabral, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and many others. They interrogated the hierarchical rhetoric of imperial policies, leading finally to a phase of unprecedented decolonisation from the fifties to the nineties.
Synchronous to the culmination of political events has been the congruent developments of technology, during political agitation after World War II, where technology was appropriated for projects of political dissent. It is compelling to note the dissolution of established colonies in an era when Marshall McLuhan, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were promulgating their theories. The interface between media theory and postcolonialism now seems determinable with the contributions of Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway and others. Having considered such a mass of extraordinarily significant events in the last half of the twentieth century combined with equally shifting theory, how would it be possible to conceive of an exhibition that considered the largely uncharted ground of media complicity in these countries?
In countries like Mozambique, South Africa, and Angola, citizens living in the diaspora often nurtured revolutionary ideas, frequently transmitted to the outside world by radio, television and print media. Within the matrix of subversive neo-colonialist politics lies the lure of disseminating propaganda through the media. Applied so successfully by the South African government during the Apartheid regime the media seductively coerced the majority of the white middle class. The monopolistic bureau of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) had a very late start – television was introduced commercially to South Africa in the mid 1970s. It became the ultimate alliance to fight 'terrorism' – a manufactured war defined by the South African totalitarian milieu. All media content that was broadcast was diminished, sanitized, edited.
The experimental Russian film director, Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970) pioneered a very simple and effective device for editing. The 'Kuleshov Effect' was basically a rudimentary editing contrivance to produce a continuum or narrative in a story. Two images edited together are apparently not interpreted separately by the audience. In terms of the infamous 'war' in Angola these tactics were deviously fabricated by the authorities: Kalashnikov (AK-47) in one frame, black man in the other, we have a terrorist! It is fascinating that television broadcasters in South Africa would have succumbed to such elementary tactics of communist predilection. Communism aroused the most ambiguous consternation and completely bewildered the regime. Such retardative propaganda would galvanize a sector of society that became peculiarly complicit in the Apartheid agency. Consider the consequences of broadcasting soap series like 'Dallas', flaunting and advocating lifestyles of exclusive social fluidity in realms of material sufficiency. Cinema was defined by well-fortified clichés of Western consumerism especially those stereotypes that exalted sentimental, conspiring and augmenting concepts of justice. International news was diverted, edited, grafted, the real motive washed away by the sanitized and cohesive ethics promoted in middle class America. The media became the most undemocratic when it conveyed stereotyped notions of western representational conventions – the generative construction of news that negated any form of political insurrection. If the formulaic propaganda of pre-democratic South Africa was considered the left arm of the dictator, then the media (in its variegated forms) was the right arm. Communism was treated with the identical all-pervasive suspicion of television – both had to be controlled and abated at all costs. Television fuelled the establishment during the eighties and nineties. What is the media's role now, post-Apartheid, post-independence?
The answers to these begging questions will ultimately crystallize the tenuous ethos of a newly born nation. Broadcast history is paradoxical in so-called underdeveloped countries. We missed the televising of the moon landing, Vietnam, the American race riots. We missed that indomitable spectacle of cinematic history in the fifties that offended proponents of the mythical 'nuclear family' – Harry Bellafonte kissing, sorry, about to kiss a white woman on stage – can you imagine?
– Jose Ferreira
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