Bioart + Design Africa

VIAD

 Imminent and Eminent Ecologies

RUSSEL HLONGWANE, AMY WILSON, FRANCOIS KNOETZE 

Biography 
Russel Hlongwane works in the production and assembly of culture, focusing on heritage, tradition, and modernity in South Africa. He moves between art-making (installation and film) and curating. His performance work serves as a bridge to transmit his academic interests to a broader audience, while his writing practice spans academia, policy, and art journals. His most recent peer-reviewed paper is titled ‘Transcendental Technologies, Mother Tongues and Space’ (2022). Hlongwane works intentionally with language (isiZulu) as a way to mobilise ideas contained in suppressed histories. His work Ifu Elimnyama (The Dark Cloud) has featured in six exhibitions and won the Sharjah Film Platform Jury Award in 2019. He curated the Bristol-based Cntrl Shift Network festival, featuring filmic works from the Global South that confront the relationship between technology and the continent. 

Lo-Def Film Factory (Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson) is a DIY artist duo working across archival research, dramaturgy, and visual strategies using video art, collage, sculptural installation, and virtual reality. The duo aims to create a space for storytelling through the democratisation of filmmaking via video by, and for, underrepresented communities across Southern Africa. They run workshops and collaborate with various communities, valuing the transmission of ideas and lived experience over high production values. Their VR experience and research project The Subterranean Imprint Archive explores the legacy of technologies used in the extraction of mineral resources in Central and Southern Africa. It has been shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, University of African Futures (France), MUTEK Montreal, and the Geneva International Film Festival. Knoetze and Wilson have exhibited at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, the Centre Pompidou, the Dakar Biennale, the Lubumbashi Biennale, and the Akademie Der Künste, Berlin. 

General Artist Statement  

This project marks the first collaboration between Durban-based cultural producer Russel Hlongwane and artist duo Lo-Def Film Factory (Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson). Hlongwane, whose practice includes artistic research, cultural production, design theory, writing, film, urban studies and curatorship, obsesses over the tensions in heritage, modernity, culture and tradition as they apply to black life. His work Ifu Elimnyama: The Dark Cloud, which won the 2019 Sharjah Film Platform Jury Award, draws on Zulu cosmology, folklore and systems of transcendence, placing them within a digital framework delivered through video, installation and a performance lecture. 

The work of Knoetze and Wilson, which began as an amateur mobile filmmaking workshop in 2019, uses participatory and performative modes of enquiry to make collaborative artistic research projects. They take a lo-fi, D.I.Y approach to new media, video art, collage and sculptural installation. Their work is particularly interested in questions about technology as they apply to the continent, and the relationship between primary materials and social/geopolitical issues. 

Over the course of several years, Hlongwane, Wilson and Knoetze have focused on the entanglement of technology to indigeneity, questions around technopolitics on the African continent, and the use of the speculative method as a way to valorise situated knowledges from the global South. This work has taken the form of a film, a critical text, the creation of a set of sculptural prototypes, performances and workshops with young people in South Africa and Brazil. Their research has drawn from pre-colonial technological practices, such as iron smelting and stone-building methods, to large-scale post-independence African technological successes (and failures), combining historical archives with speculative imaginings.  

Artist Statement on Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness 

Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness (2023) is a creative research project by South African artists Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson. In fabricating a fictional institute and its archive, the artists explore and imagine vernacular technological practices operating across the African continent. 

An intertextual conversation between the documentary and the poetic, the video operates as an in-house media assemblage created for the preservation of the institute’s activities and ideas. The work’s title refers to the Dzata ruins at the former Venda kingdom in Limpopo, a significant archaeological site from the year 1400 constructed with a dark blue stone in an architectural style similar to that of Great Zimbabwe. The institute’s scientists follow a long tradition of transcendentalists (iSanusi in isiZulu) being roaming figures, who moved from kingdom to kingdom accumulating different methods and ingredients for the sake of altering reality and accessing realms beyond our own. Their laboratories – sites of knowledge production – are crop fields, rivers, homesteads. 

The project aims to foreground indigenous technological knowledge and to explore how science, technology and innovation are part of a long interlinked process of accumulative knowledge production which extends long into the past. The research was inspired by project mentor Prof. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s work which re-centres African modes of thought.  

Accompanying the film is the Tsetse Fly sculpture crafted by Francois Knoetze, which is also a recurring symbol in the film. These representations of the Tsetse are a response to Mavhunga’s seminal work, The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production (2018), which explains how Southern African indigenous knowledge of the Tsetse fly was co-opted into western science and translated into colonial science and policy, thereby illustrating how scientific and technological knowledge is part of a long chain of accumulative innovation and experimentation. Looking closely at the tsetse fly opens up a space where Africans can talk about the global circulation of biological material, but also the ways that scientific and technological knowledge is produced.  

This project was supported by the Mozilla Foundation’s Creative Media Award (2022) and Mozilla Foundation Alumni Connection Grant (2024), and received the following awards: Award of Distinction (2024): STARTS Prize Africa (Ars Electronica); Honorary Mention (2023): Prix Ars Electronica – New Animation Award; Lumen Prize (2023): Global Majority Award; and Moving Image Art Prize Nominee (2023): Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. 

With thanks to Project Mentors Professor Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga and Oulimata Gueye.