Benjamin Tiven
United States, Kenya | 2013 | 12 min
World premiere
Language : Swahili
Subtitles : English, French
The archivist of the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation in Nairobi, searching for one image, leads us through shelves stacked with video cassettes. The voiceover recounts the arrival of video technology in Kenya, its impact on image archiving, their gradual deletion and the language problem that the very word ‘image’ poses in Swahili.
The archivist of the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation in Nairobi walks through shelves stacked with video cassettes. He opens and closes boxes as if looking for a particular cassette, while the voiceover recounts the arrival of video technology in Kenya, its impact on the archiving of images and their gradual deletion for financial reasons: “For an image to survive, it would have to be exceptional, it would have to show us the world in a magical and unique manner” (BT). But what remains of the deleted images? Can the recorded images evoke those they replace on the tape? We can add to these questions the language problem of Swahili which uses precise words to define drawing, photography, film and video, and has no generic word to talk of an “image” which cannot exist separately from its medium. In the middle of a room full of video cassettes, the archivist sets up a 16 mm projector that the camera looks at head on: “the material occurrence of these media becomes the aesthetic occurrence of this work.” (BT)
Paolo Moretti
