VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

Capetonian Gallery Lot-lizards carry away, with only Pieter Hugo to inform them?(2010).In another blog article, Isaac Anyaogo commented on the exhibition in more bitter terms:Mr. Hugo’s collection of photographs about Nollywood evidences a conclusion basedon a stereotype. It is an intelligent effort to creatively manage ignorance. […] Thesettings of the collection are dreary, bland or outright creepy. For emotion, there isdread and an uncanny melancholy. They seem to choke you as they gasp for air tobreath. The subjects fly out at your face, you lock eyes with them and you will be thefirst to avert a gaze. In Nollywood films, we see palatial mansions, choice cars andpleasing sights. Nollywood destroyed the myth that Africans still lived on trees (2010).However, beyond this intricate debate, the content of Hugo’s exhibition can suggest someinteresting points for the analysis proposed here. If we take the exhibition for what Hugosupposedly wanted it to be (that is, an ironic and excessive mirror of Western imagery aboutNollywood and contemporary Africa), we can then use these photographs to discuss precisely themain features of this same imagery. Hugo’s images, in fact, push to an extreme level some of thediscursive subtexts we observed in both the documentaries and the retrospectives on Nollywood.What could be considered as the ordering concept behind much of the discursive productionanalyzed in this chapter, and behind most of Hugo’s photographs, is that of the ruin. The videoindustry is portrayed as the triumph of informality and of recycling, the result of the unexpectedrecombination of the pieces and debris left aside by failed modernization processes. In Hugo’spictures, as in most documentaries on Nollywood, Nigerian protagonists move in a world ofcollapsed infrastructures, to which they creatively react. In Hugo’s representation this allegory goesso far as portraying the Nollywood actors (and the idea of Africa they represent) as zombies thatemerge from a land of death to stare at the eyes of their ancient and present oppressors (thecolonizers and the present-day postcolonial authorities). In this perspective Lagos, and the videoindustry that represents its glamorous cultural expression, are seen as the metaphor of thepostcolonial ruin, something that is, at the same time, an idealized and haunting image of Europeanpast (the ruins of the Empire) and the projection of its potential future (the future collapse of theEuropean project of modernity brought about by the economic crisis and the migrants’ “invasion”).130