Of What Remains: Spectral Infrastructures of Colonial Extraction in the Namib Desert
Of What Remains: Spectral Infrastructures of Colonial Extraction in the Namib Desert
Thu 5 May 2022, 12-14, Zoom 975 9738 3492, passcode: 850069 (RS Knowledges)
Abstract
This presentation takes Aryan Kaganoff‘s experimental film Western 4.33 (34min, 2002) as a starting point in order to explore the question of what remains in zones of extraction in the context of German colonialism in Namibia and the genocide against the OvaHerero and Nama population. The film approaches this question by focusing on former sites and infrastructures of diamond extraction in the south of Namibia, particularly in the !Namib desert, and provides an audiovisual attunement to these haunted spaces of absence. The film does so, as the title suggests, on the level of the sound as well as the image by turning to the ’infra’ in infrastructure, hence to a world on the brink of perception. I am interested in these aesthetic strategies that make the spectral infrastructures perceivable and will link the question ofwhat remains to my own fieldwork on the extractive zone north of Lüderitz.