In any familiar image lingers a latent yearning for alternative ways in which meaning can be subtly altered and pushed into abstraction.
Abstractions are articulated in this video poem as conditions of becoming rather than a fixed state, forcing us to contemplate and look at anew.
And even if figures appear in some parts of this continuous flow of images, they are pushed into an abstract and strangely disembodied state.
But when interwoven with archival audio, the juxtaposition lays bare links between colonial infrastructure rooted in the dispossession of indigenous land and contemporary conditions of inequality obscured by the illusion of progressive motion towards modernity.
The lucid monologues by stalwarts such as Dr. Nthato Motlana and Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, by undermining established patterns of thought ascribed to visuals, invite viewers to explore alternative modes of recalling, a sonic mapping of our present through voices from the past.
The past is by no means silent; it is full of sounds that can be rediscovered through research, and these sounds, voices, slogans and hymns simulate the archetypal sounds of revolution, and reveal their psychoacoustic potential for rousing activism in the contemporary mind.
UNTITLED #25 thus explores colonial archives, retrieves erased narratives, and proposes new languages of struggle, a grammar of dissidence, which is characterised the struggle for freedmen South Africa.
