VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

photography. I mean, do you honestly think a portrait can tell you anything about thesubject? And, even if it did, would you trust what it had to say? (Hugo quoted inO’Hagan 2008).For this reason, Hugo’s work entertains a controversial relation with the idea of documentaryphotography itself. As Stacy Hardy emphasized, Hugo’s portraits make the distinction between“representation (of something real)” and “simulation (with no secure reference to reality)” blurred,to the point that “the normal relation between sign and referent [is] radically remixed” and we lose“the connection, once presumed to exist, between sign or image and the reality to which both werethought to refer” (2009: 32). According to this interpretation, what is represented in the“Nollywood” exhibition is not the Nigerian video industry, but a constructed image that is supposedto challenge and mirror Western imagery about African present-day reality. This imagery isconditioned by media’s negative portrayal of the continent, a portrayal in which violence, povertyand wilderness are mixed together in what creates the illusion of an African “pathology ofspectrality and transience” (Hardy 2009: 31). Hugo plays with the recurring features of thisimagery. He makes them real through the use of a plainly documentarian photographic technique,and then throws them straight into the audience’s face in an attempt to challenge the audience’s ownstereotypes and preconception about Africa and contemporary African cultures.Through this double play Hugo assaults divisions – white vs black, dominant vssubmissive, author vs authority, Alien vs Predator, Ekwensu vs God – simultaneouslyembracing the worst stereotypes and snarling ‘fuck you’ at all of them. The result is […]not so much a deconstruction as a calculated destruction of representation itself (Hardy2009: 31).As this brief analysis suggests, Hugo’s attempt is interesting and complex, but unfortunately hissophisticate deconstruction of Western imageries passes often radically unnoticed, and thephotographs end up being considered as an example of that same imagery they are supposed tocriticize. In most of the cases, in fact, the exhibition is taken as a realistic representation ofNollywood. This misunderstanding is induced by at least two factors. On the one hand, thephotographs are often exhibited on the occasion of some festival retrospective on Nollywood,giving the audience the idea that they are a natural extension of the round tables and documentaryfilms programmed during the festival. On the other hand, the exhibition catalogue seems to have a128