In 2010 it will be 50 years since 17 African colonies gained their independence. A kind of inventory of half a century of decolonization in the German-speaking context by means of a library card catalog. In a sequence of stills projected on three channels this catalog is “leafed through” at the belatedly inserted entry “decolonization.” On the soundtrack we hear an excerpt from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “nouveau roman” La Jalousie, which explicitly works against narrative, depth, engagement, humanism, and tragedy. In this section of the text, which views the banana plantation surrounding an estate somewhere in a colony, there is no longer any actual agency. Instead, constellations of things are merely registered, turning the form of the novel into a kind of inventory process.
“Without bothering with the order in which the actually visible banana trees and the cut banana trees occur, the sixth row gives the following numbers: twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty, nineteen”.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, La Jalousie, 1957
“In turning from an extractive to a more ethnographic project, our readings need to move in new ways through archives both along their fault lines as much as against their grain.”
Ann Laura Stoler, 2002
3-channel video installation
Brigitta Kuster, born 1970, lives and works in Berlin and Zurich as a cultural producer / artist / writer. Numerous exhibition participations, most recently “Randzonen der Bilder” (Kunsthaus Dresden 2009), “Kollektive Kreativität” (Fridericianum Kassel 2005), Projekt Migration (Köln 2005).
Selected list of works:
2002/2003: rien ne vaut que la vie mais la vie même ne vaut rien (with Moise Merlin Mabouna), 2003: copy me – i want to travel (with Pauline Boudry und Renate Lorenz), 2004: Kamera läuft! Ein kleines postfordistisches Drama (with Isabell Lorey, Marion von Osten, Katja Reichard), 2005: S. – je suis, je lis à haute voix [passing for], 2006: 2006-1892 = 114 ans / jahre (with Moise Merlin Mabouna), 2009: À travers l‘encoche d‘un voyage dans la bibliothèque coloniale. Notes pittoresques (with Moise Merlin Mabouna).
Contact: brigitta_kuster@snafu.de
