Diabolical Architectures of Colonialism (2023), a research-based film, is a durational, allegorical response to the voices absent from data critically analysed in the Cecil Rhodes archive (held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford) from times during the Kimberley diamond rush (1871), South African gold rushes (1873-1886), and African expansion as a result of British, German, and Portuguese imperialism.
A speculative invocation of awkward spectres encapsulating both the injured body and the haunted injurious body of colonial legacy renders the negative spaces of extraction. Inspired by The Divine Comedy, speaking to colonialism's temporal and psychological relentlessness, this film peeks at the haunted underside of perfect digital utopias, as the capture of resources still shapes today’s global economic disparities and interplanetary colonisation fantasies. Accompanied by a slowly building score evoking material earth, an unknown narrator offers poetic musings on these absences.
Created almost entirely in Unity 3D, the game engine software, this film subverts the three-act hero structure. It demands the viewer to stay with its temporal conceit, as it conceptually engages the legacies of time, labour, psychological, material, and climate decimation in colonialism's afterlives, examining how one's cultural history and current reality are embedded and continued within these evasive bureaucratic languages, ledgers, and legacies.
Runtime 42.00.
Premiered at Transmediale, Berlin in 2023.
Premiered at Transmediale, Berlin in 2023.
