VIDEOS IN MOTION - fasopo

While, according to Koolhaas, junkspace is visible and evident in contemporary Westernarchitecture, its full realization is in cities like Lagos where, beyond the “gigantic rubbish dump”that parallel “entire roads”, an intensively organized life takes place (Koolhaas 2002b: 175). Thislife, in Koolhaas’ eyes, is structured around and in relation with the junkspace that failedmodernization processes have left behind. Lagos (and the Nollywood industry, that interests usmore closely) becomes in this perspective a laboratory for the construction of what we might call a“junkspace modernity”, that is, a modernity never achieved, probably always dreamed of, andsymbolized by the constant interconnection between failure and efficiency that is often used toportray it.Once again, the objective of this analysis is not to evaluate if Koolhaas’ idea of Lagos (and,together with it, the postmodern fascination for the postcolonial ruin) represents and portrays theNigerian reality appropriately. Lagos might well be the metaphor of global cities’ future, andNollywood’s guerrilla filmmaking the avant-garde of future developments in filmmakingworldwide. The issue here is that such a representation does not and cannot take into account theway Nigerian themselves dream about their future. 108 Even if in everyday reality Lagos andNollywood might propose implicitly a different model of organizing a city and a film industry, thedream they are built upon is the achievement of those processes of modernization that theStructural-Adjustment-era has frozen. The way Lagos is transforming its urban organization andinfrastructures since the election of Babatunde Raji Fashola as Lagos State Governor and the wayNollywood is developing over the past few years (see chapter three) demonstrate this point. AsJames Ferguson has emphasized,the application of a language of alternative modernities to the most impoverishedregions of the globe risks becoming a way of avoiding talking about the non-serialized,de-temporalized political economic statuses of our time, and thus, evading the questionof a rapidly worsening global inequality and its consequences (2006: 192).A postcolonial-exotic-perspective on the video industry, such as the one that emerges as subtext ofthe documentaries and festivals discussed in this chapter, tends to idealize and reify the actual108 As Peter Geschiere, Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels argue in their introduction to the edited collection Reading inModernity in Africa, “many Africans might not be content with being placed in such a specific trajectory [that of the“alternative modernities”, nda] and would prefer admission to the same modern life that brought so much prosperity tothe West” (2008: 2).132