VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

It is important to underline here that the European fascination for ruins is centuries-old. Asnumerous scholars have underlined (cf. Dillon 2011; Hell and Schönle 2010), ruins have in factplayed a powerful role in the history of Western arts since Romanticism, and they are today theobject of numerous contemporary artists’ interest. As Brian Dillon has suggested,[on the one hand] the ruin appears to point to a deep and vanished past whose relicsmerely haunt the present, reminding us of such airy and perennial themes as the hubrisof Man and the weight of History. On the other, ruins seem to traffic with the modern,and with the future, in ironic and devious ways.[…] Ruins seem, in fact, intrinsic to theprojects of modernity and, later, Modernism (2010).It is within this context that we can read the subtext of the discursive practices I analyzed in thischapter. They construct Lagos and Nollywood as aesthetic objects that can fit within thecontemporary Western fascination for the limits and fractures of the modernization process (cf.Amselle 2005). This kind of fascination is well described by Rem Koolhaas’ definition of“junkspace” in conjunction with his early conceptualization of Lagos as the “city of the future”. 107Junkspace, according to Koolhaas, is the main figure of the contemporary age:if space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residuemankind leaves on the planet. The built […] product of modernization is not modernarchitecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run itscourse, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, itsfallout (2002a: 175).107 In the documentary Lagos/Koolhaas (2002), the Dutch architect says: “Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, wemay be catching up with Lagos . . .". According to this early analysis made by Koolhaas, Lagos represents the model ofthe post-modern city, a model toward which all cities in the world are inevitably going. In this city people havereinvented their life upon the ruins of the state-directed project of modernization and informality is the ruling principleof the city’s organization (for a critique of this representation of Lagos see Fourchard 2011). As the same documentaryshows, however, later in his career and after having spent more time in Lagos over a long term period, Koolhaasmodified his ideas about the Nigerian megacity. Toward the end of the film he says: “the people of Lagos are interestedin keeping the myth of Lagos alive, the myth of them being the only people able to survive it. But the reality of facts isthat Lagos is changing and it might become a city much more normal than it used to be, a city like many others in theworld”.131