Core Dump: in cybernetic terms, it means the recorded state of working memory in a computer, fixed at a specific point of time, to be recovered after a crash. Technology has memory, a built-in archive of information and inscribed circuits of knowledge, that can be acted and re-enacted. But is memory a sole and fixed unit? And what kind of memory is contained? Whose past does it refer to? Francois Knoetze introduces us to the African imprint to technology. In this short video (the first chapter of the four-part series Core Dump), modern life is a prison to escape from, and hope in machines as devices of liberation is revealed to be a lie - an illusion instrumentalized by the European powers that have always struggled to grab any kind of resources from Africa. This scenario is strongly challenged by the transformative experience - affective, psychological, physical and aesthetic - of the main character. Resurrected from an explosion, a modern Frankenstein dominates the screen. Burned and wounded, he has to fix himself. He repairs, replaces, and updates his body as a balanced mix of human and machine features: he is now a mysterious techno-bodily assemblage of electronic waste dispositives, a cyborg wearing an African mask. The blood in his veins is mixed with mercury, his bones are made of lead, his nerves are electric conductors, his voice is not human, but his movements are not exactly robotic. His “core has remained intact.” This re-creation is a conscious and infinite process of engineering, turning into a way to escape being a prisoner of history. His haunting figure is the representation of the deep entrenchment of the digital technology industry with techno-colonialism and capitalism. It is a relationship built and sustained beginning with the Atlantic slave trade, which established the boundaries between race and technology, nature and civilisation, fostering the institution of an enduring system of exploitation and control. For, as the video shows, the Western empire of technology needs African primary resources, which it returns as nothing more than e-waste, amassed in dangerous dumps. The video is a convulsive collage that combines moving images, electronic sounds, and popular music, drawing particularly from the films of Ousmane Sembène and the period of the Non-Aligned Movement. The city of Dakar is represented through the re-proposal of certain recurrent images in the mediatic visual repertoire, such as open-air dumps of e-waste often portrayed by media outlets, urban landscapes where the cyborg walks and dances alone, highly symbolic monuments (such as Le Monument de la Renaissance Africaine, built to commemorate the anniversary of independence from France). Among other symbolic elements, a bitten apple seems to embody a crash whose restore point dates back to the origin of the world, when history had not yet been written. By hinting that in the production and distribution of the first Macintosh lies the existence of original sin of a technological rather than a spiritual nature, the world to come into which Knoetze projects us is not a world of redemption but one of revenge, where "those who are last, shall be first. Those who are first, will be last." In the overlapping of fictional scenes with black and white footage of Africa in the past decades, looting and plundering - the constant patterns of global (post)colonial capitalism - are exposed and condemned. But the focus is not (only) on the devastating consequences for those who are included in the circuit of technological development only as (receivers of) refusals; the film calls into question instead the masquerading of a technological progress that can only be conceived in Western terms. What if technology wasn’t just a Western privilege? Past and present are interconnected through the cyborg’s cloud memory, reverberating images and voices from ancestors, like resurrecting ghosts in the machine. He re-enacts the speech Leopold Senghor delivered at the Non-Aligned Movement Conference in 1975, guarding his people against plundering and extraction, encouraging an African style of industrialization, and claiming to reaffirm their culture. With this speech and the many other references to an alternative history beginning with the Non-Aligned Movement, Knoetze is able to conjure and visually perform/exhibit the desire for an African techno-utopia, through which to abolish the primacy of the West and new forms of subalternity and instead, advance the alliance of the enslaved population with technology, encrypting the African culture. This positioning has generated an aesthetic that differs from the cyborg imagery. The protagonist does not have the biomechanical and bionic body of many creatures of Western contemporary literature and art; his appearance does not merely reproduce or recycle an existing model, it creates a new presence that is capable of generating its own temporal, spatial, social, cultural, ethical, and political dimension. This form of cosmotechnics is here to indicate a way of overcoming the machine enslavement and moving towards a hacking of the imperial system, connecting the material traces of our digital present into a circuit of human-machine relations as a form of indigenous techno-aesthetic resistance, questioning and debunking the presumed hierarchies of knowledge. (Alessandra Ferlito and Olga Solombrino)