Video-ensaio sobre pan-africanismo

Imagem: Delfina Foundation/Tim Bowditch (Contemporary and)

In the Year of the Quiet Sun, da autoria de The Otolith Group, é um filme ensaio sobre o ideal do pan-africanismo, que parte de um fenómeno solar que acontece de 11 em 11 anos: durante um destes momentos, entre 1964 e 1965, alguns estados africanos emitiram selos comemorativos das recentes independências. Esta improvável relação é o mote da reflexão, comentada por  Tamar Garb, na Contemporary and 

These spheres of saturated yellow and red with spiky, radiating rays – reproduced in the film – seem to shine a beneficent light onto the orbiting earth. But down below, despite similar philatelic symbolisation – stars, spheres, roundels and flags proliferate on the commemorative and celebratory stamps of decolonisation and independence – the territorial and political transformation of the unquiet continent far exceeds the capacity of these miniscule propaganda prints to adequately tell its tale.

It is this disjunction between the minute materiality of the postage stamps and the epic events they commemorate that the film dramatises so brilliantly. Taking its formal cue from the period-specific design and display value of these small but significant prints, In the Year of the Quiet Sun blows up the scale of the stamp, allowing it to fill the screen. Stamp and screen become one, flattening out and filtering the archival and documentary footage with which it is interwoven and juxtaposed. The stamps themselves are interesting: we notice their schematic design, the simplified graphics of 1960s commercial art and advertising; and the standardised lettering and modernist fonts which situate them firmly in the American context from which they were generated and distributed. Why, asks the narrator, are the symbols of pan-African liberation and decolonisation designed on Wall Street?

Pode ler o artigo completo em Of states and stamps: the otolith group at the delfina foundation