Night/life
“During colonization the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in the morning.”
— Fanon, “On Violence”, The Wretched of the Earth.
Still from “Night Litany”, experimental short. Part of the Black Nocturnal series. 2021.
black nocturnal is a research project and experimental film series about nightlife in the afterlives of slavery and coloniality in the Black world, with a current focus on Lagos, Nigeria. The space between night & life expresses both disjuncture and possibility, capture and excess. The book manuscript, black nocturnal, insurgent nightscapes in Lagos, explores the historical and ongoing conditions that make nighttime one of the most embattled terrains of life in Lagos as well as the quotidian ways people reclaim and inhabit nighttime as a site of possibility in the shadow of the ongoing catastrophe of racial capitalism.
Taking the night as metaphor and methodology, the experimental shorts series, black nocturnal, explores epistemologies of the dark entangled with logics of surveillance and criminalization in places like Johannesburg, Boston and Lagos. Via an aesthetic of fragments, obliqueness and underexposure, this series refuses the violence of visualization, and asks what ways of seeing, knowing, and being might emerge from engagements with dark matters.
Works within the film series:
Night Litany B, 2021, 9’, digital
Lantern Laws, 2022, 9’, 16mm
Frenzies, in post-production, 16mm
Exposure, 2022, 14’, digital, surveillance footage, 16mm
On the Ocean Black night, 2023, 11’, 16mm, digital
