The Subterranean Imprint Archive is a research project culminating in a VR experience (6dof). Inspired by the film Akira (1988) by Katsuhiro Otomo, the work situates the viewer in a counter-archive which traces the legacy of technopolitics in Central and Southern Africa. The starting point of the work is Shinkolobwe, a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the uranium used in the Manhattan project was extracted. The image of Congolese ore exploding over Japan is a symbol of the earth-shattering devastation whose impact continues to be felt on the African continent. While the eyes of the world were transfixed on a city engulfed in a ball of light, a long shadow was cast. The Lo-Def Film Factory’s work involves archival research, dramaturgy, and visual strategies associated with video art, collage, sculptural installation and Virtual Reality, to explore and create space for collaborative, experimental community storytelling.
Biographies
Performer, writer and cultural producer Amy Louise Wilson graduated from University of Cape Town and Rhodes University. As an actress, she has made appearances in numerous film, television and theatre productions, both local and international. In 2020, she won the Distell National Playwright Competition as a writer. With Francois Knoetze she founded Lo-Def Film Factory, a South African participatory community cinema initiative. Wilson is “committed to facilitating collectively minded, radical and subversive storytelling through film”. Francois Knoetze is a scavenger, sculptor, performer, and video artist with an interest in the connections between social histories and material culture. His roaming costumed performances and experimental videos pick at the socio-spatial force-fields that attempt to rigidly order the contaminated, folded, and entangled worlds of people and things. His videos create narrative portraits of the uncertainty in the nervous system of a global digital machine at the brink of collapse. Knoetze is a co-founder of the Lo-Def Film Factory. Based in South Africa, the collective’s work involves archival research, dramaturgy and visual strategies associated with video art, collage, sculptural installation and Virtual Reality, to explore and create space for collaborative, experimental community storytelling.