Thursday, October 8 | Paris-based filmmaker Louis Henderson in person!
In his first Chicago appearance, award-winning director Louis Henderson presents a pair of films on the networked links between colonialism, computing, and capitalism in contemporary Ghana. In Lettres du Voyant (2013), a series of mysterious letters describe the practice of “Sakawa”—e-scams fortified by Western African religious rituals—and the possibilities it proposes for political resistance. Choreographed on Henderson’s desktop screen, All That Is Solid (2014) maps connections between the Cloud and its waste, layering ephemeral image searches, email, data, and notes over footage of the grinding physical labor of the massive Agbogbloshie electronic waste ground in Accra. Presented in collaboration with the Video Data Bank.
2013–14, France, HD Video, ca 60 min + discussion
Louis Henderson (1983, Norwich) is an English filmmaker whose research focuses on new materialities of the Internet and the neocolonialisation of cyberspace through planetary scale computing. He is a graduate of London College of Communication and Le Fresnoy–studio national des arts contemporains and is currently finishing a post-diplôme at the European School of Visual Arts. His work has been exhibited across Europe and the Americas, including at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Transmediale, Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogota, The Centre Pompidou, FRAC Midi-Pyrénées, Louisiana museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Whitechapel Gallery.
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