Night/life
“During colonization the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in the morning.”
— Fanon, “On Violence”, The Wretched of the Earth.
Still from “Night Litany”, experimental short. Part of the Black Nocturnal series. 2021.
Night/life is my dissertation project as well as a mixed media artistic project which explores experiences of nighttime in the afterlives of coloniality in Lagos & Johannesburg. The space between night & life expresses both disjuncture and possibility, capture and excess. The dissertation, “black nocturnal: insurgent ecologies of the night in Lagos” explores the historical and ongoing conditions that make nighttime one of the most embattled terrains of life in Lagos as well as the quotidian ways people reclaim and inhabit nighttime as a site of possibility in the shadow of the ongoing catastrophe of racial capitalism.
Taking the night as metaphor and methodology, Black Nocturnal as a series of experimental shorts, explores epistemologies of the dark entangled with logics of surveillance and criminalization in the afterlives of slavery and colonialism in Lagos. Via an aesthetic of fragments, obliqueness and underexposure, this series refuses the violence of visualization, and asks what ways of seeing, knowing, and being might emerge from engagements with dark matters.
Works within the series:
Night Litany B, 2021, 9’, digital
Lantern Laws, 2022, 9’, 16mm
Frenzies, in post-production, 16mm
Exposure, 2022, 14’, digital, surveillance footage, 16mm
On the Ocean Black night, 2023, 11’, 16mm, digital
