The Cosmogony of (Racial) Capitalism
Dele Adeyemo, co-written with producer Christxpher Oliver
(2020, 14’, colour, sound; Language: EN)
More info about the film:
http://empathyrevisited.iksv.org/en/project/41-the-cosmogony-of-racial-capitalism
The video will be available to watch starting from December 4th, 2020 until December 12th, 2020.The Cosmogony of (Racial) Capitalism, 2020, Dele Adeyemo and Christxpher Oliver, still from video.
Abstract
Through the media of essay, film, and drawing, The Cosmogony of (Racial) Capitalism is a design-led investigation into the material cultures present at the birth of capitalism and its emergence out of the relations of power forged in the integrated network of the sugar-cane plantation. The project was presented at the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial in 2020, titled Empathy Revisited with additional support from the Het Nieuwe Instituut.
Prototyping practices of colonisation, industrial agricultural production and Atlantic slavery, Europe's sugar cane plantations would propel the expansion of capitalism across the planet, transforming notions of race in the process. Taking as its point of departure the meeting between the Portuguese and the Edo people in the Kingdom of Benin, a leading society in West Africa among the Yoruba, Dele Adeyemo recovers long-neglected histories that narrate the extension of the Mediterranean world to the Guinea Coast. By revisiting the cartographic practices of these European and African societies, he explores the initial conditions in which global capitalism came into being.
The film made of The Cosmogony of (Racial) Capitalism takes the form of an oral ruttier through time. Narrated and directed by the architect Dele Adeyemo, and co-written with producer Christxpher Oliver, The Cosmogony of (Racial) Capitalism weaves together Dele's personal archival footage gathered over several years across the West Coast of Africa whilst researching the genealogy of the slave castle on the Guinea Coast and the role this spatial product has played in logistical capitalism.
Bio
Dele Adeyemo is an architect, creative director and urban theorist. His creative practice and research interrogate the underlying drivers in the production of space, locating them in the racialising logic of logistical processes that orchestrate planetary patterns of life. Dele is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, a fellow of the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and a current recipient of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Andrew Mellon research grant. He leads an architecture design studio at the Royal College of Art in London.
Christxpher Oliver is a writer, research editor and art director. His research interests focus on issues in political economy through the lens of Black Studies. In addition, his technical practice examines the process of creating fxrums as mediums to do political work, through using mixed media and writing techniques to translate insights from the field into various forms of pedagogical, political and performance based interventions. He is a 2019 graduate from the Centre for Research Architecture masters program at Goldsmiths, University of London. Christxpher co-wrote, mixed and edited The Cosmogony of (Racial) Capitalism with Director Dele Adeyemo, and is the Assistant Symposium Coordinator to Recursive Colonialism.
Through an oral ruttier, cuttings of archival media, and drawing, this project moves through time and space, history and geography to uncover the cartographic practices present in The Cosmogony of (Racial) Capitalism. The film invites the audience to ask: “What was the perspective of the enslaved Africans transported to the early plantations of the Atlantic islands?” Taking as its point of departure the meeting between the Portuguese and the Edo people in the Kingdom of Benin, a leading society in West Africa among the Yoruba, Dele Adeyemo surfaces negated histories that connect the extension of the Mediterranean world to the Guinea Coast transforming notions of race in the process. This project moves within, between and against the colonising cartography rooted in Europe's sugar cane plantations which propelled the expansion of the slave trade, slavery and racial capitalism across the planet. By studying the mapping technologies of European and African societies through the portolan map and the ceremony of the Masquerade, the tracing of Yoruba cosmological artefacts extends a practice of (re)creating worlds.
The research film begins with a circular rotating form emerging from darkness. Constituted from a composite drawing, each layer spins demonically in varying directions around a central axis, creating a portal that the viewer is transported through. Dele Adeyemo’s design-led practice directs the composition, tracing artefacts found through his research process studying the genealogy of slave castles along the Guinea Coast and the creation of Europe’s early sugar-cane plantations on the Atlantic islands. As part of this collaborative project, Christxpher Oliver cuts and mixes Dele’s archival footage, as well as drawing from his own selection. The recursive bass rhythm - a remixed recording of the sun's vibrational movement over time - probes the film's narrative holding the investigation within a celestial beat. At intervals during the introduction sequence, the spinning composite drawing pauses at points in time, indicating cosmic episodes and planetary events significant to the worlding of human logistical networks.
Preceding the intertitles which structure the film, a burst of visual references citing material from fields of art, science and design, time-travel between historical and contemporary interpretations of capitalism as a planetary system. The recursive bass rhythm connecting the component parts of the film, advances and retracts, mixing with field recordings of sharp metallic sounds, sourced from the setup of a soundsystem; cut with voices from research dialogues and performances; translating the nonlinear practice of collaboration and auto-ethnographic research. The layering of archival media builds an entry point into each chapter - occasionally breaking into spaces of listening to attune to natural elements of wind and water.
Between the intertitles, Dele’s voice guides the viewer’s perspective through the audio-visual archival recordings of places and spaces sourced from his research process. This oral ruttier navigates through land-, sea- and city- scapes where images flit between their negative copies at sites such as slave forts and megaports - drawing attention to the role of architecture in the construction of race and the manufacturing of “species” as a technique for organising the plantation system. The poetics of the voice hold the listener through this journey, its echo drifting with the sonic material of the archive.
The film was presented along with an essay and drawings at the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial in 2020, titled Empathy Revisited, with additional support from the Het Nieuwe Instituut. Narrated and directed by the architect Dele Adeyemo, and co-written, mixed, and edited by Christxpher Oliver.
(Dele Adeyemo and Christxpher Oliver)
