Short Program 3: Congo Forward

'Core Dump: Shenzhen' - Watch Here

Director: Francois Knoetze

Experimental, 2018, 12 Min.

Time: October 16th - 31st

About:

In 2012, images of the mermaid-like Congolese water spirit Mami Wata began to circulate rapidly in China, sparking rumors that Chinese laborers had captured her while installing underwater fiber-optic cables in the Congo River. CORE DUMP: SHENZHEN imagines a scenario where Mami Wata is transplanted into a gadget factory in China’s first free-market Special Economic Zone, revealing the depth and complexity of contemporary Sino-African relations.

A “core dump” is the recorded state of the working memory of a computer at a specific moment in time. If a crash occurs, the computer is able to recall this ‘imprint’ of its previous state as a means to debug and recover. This oddly poetic ‘memory’ of a computer forms the basis for Francois Knoetze’s CORE DUMP, a four-part sculptural and video series filmed in Dakar, Kinshasa, Shenzhen and New York that extends the metaphor of a crash to the impending breakdown and unsustainability of the global capitalist techno-scientific system.