Output details

Escravos

On the western fringes of the Niger Delta, the Escravos estuary opens onto the Atlantic: the site of a multi-billion dollar Gas-to-Liquid project, hundreds of well-heads and gas flares, and a region in which armed militancy, state security, international oil corporations and organised crime networks are as intertwined as the tangle of pipelines. In May 2009, Nigerian government forces attacked communities in the region with helicopter gunships and gunboats. Ostensibly an offensive aimed at up-rooting militant networks, one village was razed.

ESCRAVOS comprises fragments of what I describe in other scholarly contexts as a ‘narrative geography’ of the western Delta. This approach is predicated on the notion that the political economy of the delta is graphically inscribed in its geography: ‘hidden in the order of space is a social order’ (Henri Lefebvre). The film sets out to frame the relationships that structure this space: the mud huts in the shadow of multi-billion dollar facilities, or found-frames the camera searches out and settles on, a blown out window in the last standing wall of a house, a doorway planted in the rubble. These critically composed images are an analysis of the delta’s economy of extraction and spectacular violence.

This collection of video studies and testimonies focuses on Joshua – a young builder; perhaps witness to a massacre – and his return to Okerenkoko after the incursion. In this sense, the series is not only research into film form as ‘narrative-geography’, but also an archive of primary materials on a significant episode of state-sponsored violence.

ESCRAVOS was conceived as a projection and performance piece originally staged at the Museum of London, the Dutch Art Institute and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. It was projected with live voiceover translation and commentary. It has been subtitled for submission and intertitles have been added.