Superpower-Dakar Chapter

DVCAM to digital video 14 min,
Airbrick wall (material & dimensions variable)

Referentially dense and elliptical in form, Superpower-Dakar Chapter has the disjointed feel of a TV soap opera crossed with a budget horror movie, a populist film genre in West Africa, where the films are often created for little cost using local non-professional actors. On closer inspection however, Superpower-Dakar Chapter reveals itself as a science fiction film of sorts. Shot entirely in the expanding modernist cityscape of the Senegalese capital of Dakar, the film unfurls a tangled scientific/fictional narrative emerging from three stars in the astronomical belt of Orion, and anthropomorphised in the form of three professors: Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka, played by famous local soap stars Nideye Thiaba Diop, Ousseynou Bissichi and Dakar based artist Hassan Ndiaye.

Opening with fuzzy, colour-saturated computer animations, an introductory passage to the film presents the popular internet show Star Hustler. The star hustler provides insight into the constellation 'Orion the Hunter', the three central stars, and light travel in general. Aerial Waller uses this astronomic information to underpin the central idea of the film; that light we see on earth takes thousands of years to reach us, and is effectively a window into the past. In the unfolding narrative, we follow the three professors as they prepare to run interference on an extraterrestrial particle cloud causing temporal disturbances on earth. Aerial Waller's characters slip in and out of multiple time streams, creating a psychological landscape in which fantasy and documentary become almost interchangeable. Traditional storytelling is eschewed and narrative is built solely through awkwardly acted transitional moments, stripping away the stars and constellations, and transforming into a portrait, a representation of the fluid mutability 21st Century Dakar has become.

Superpower-Dakar Chapter adopts the position of the alienated viewer, interrupting cinematic conventions with Brechtian narrative devices, multiple cultural reference points and simultaneous timeline slippage. Waller's interest in transcending cultural position, is hinted at in the film's title: 'Dakar Chapter', an oblique reference to the Hell's Angels, nomadic outsiders who refer to their separate global branches as 'Chapters'. Aerial Waller reconfigures and at times perverts traditional filmic logic, producing disjointed, psychological time travelogues in which fact and fiction, past, present and future blur. Colin Ledwith for British Council catalogue "You Have Not Been Honest"

Cast: Nideye Thiaba Diop, Ousseynou Bissichi and Dakar based artist Hassan Ndiaye.

Exhibitions
Counter Gallery, London 2004
You Have Not Been Honest, British Council Touring Exhibition, Museo D'Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples. 2007
In Search of the Unknown, Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst, Amsterdam, 2009
Superpower-Africa in Science Fiction, Arnolfini, Bristol, 2012