As someone who has been producing archives of the east of Congo for decades, I see KAPITA as a reflection on my relationship to the fundamental fallacies of modernity. On one hand, to make films I rely on modern technologies. At the same time, living in a mineral-rich conflict region, I witness firsthand the social, political, ecological, and spiritual devastation wrought by the extractive systems on which the so-called modern world depends. From this perspective, I see the inextricable and persistent relationship between colonialism, racial capitalism, and what we are expected to celebrate as progress. And yet, I depend on modernity’s tools to expose its shadow. No matter how I approach it, this paradox brings me (back) to the question of storytelling—what stories must be told to sustain the illusion that progress ought to be our aspiration? And, more the point, what stories must, by all means, be left out?
In KAPITA I pursue the omitted, the invisible. The fodder for this pursuit is a collection of archival films, including PANAMA STAR OF CONGO (1912) and LE FONCTIONNEMENT D’UNE BOURSE DE TRAVAIL (1926), which were among the first films shot in Africa to corroborate the delusion that colonization was a philanthropic civilizing project. Through a process I call “recoding aesthetics,” I mine these films for what they make invisible: the Black-skinned workers evaporated by cameras calibrated to white, the collateral death and destruction interred in infrastructure. And, perhaps most lethal of all, the carceral relationship between indigenous memory and colonial archives that leaves us imprisoned in the myth of progress. KAPITA is the second in a triptych of films dedicated to recoding aesthetics. As a whole this project is rooted in my own indigenous understanding of time and space, in which the yesterday of tomorrow is linked to tomorrow’s yesterday. The point of this aesthetic practice is to interrupt the narrative of modernity not only by seeking, mourning, and commemorating the invisible, but by proposing modes of storytelling that emancipate indigenous memory, imagination, and future possibility.
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
