Books by Paula Callus
"Survey African cinema through candid, revealing conversations with over twenty of the continent’... more "Survey African cinema through candid, revealing conversations with over twenty of the continent’s most vibrant cinematic voices, from veteran to emerging directors. Renowned filmmakers lend their voices to one-on-one interviews and group conversations, exploring African cinema as a whole and revealing their own unique experiences. Together, they illuminate trends in contemporary African cinema, ranging from emerging regional film industries to evolving gender dynamics, and the re-definition of the term “African filmmaker.”
Journal Papers by Paula Callus
Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, 2017
This article explores re-mediations of non-fiction through an examination of so-called animated d... more This article explores re-mediations of non-fiction through an examination of so-called animated documentary and interactive documentary. By focusing upon case studies from Africa, the article proposes that whilst these processes and methods are not conventionally aligned with documentary practice in a customary sense, they offer aesthetic strategies that allow artists and filmmakers to consider their position reflexively as authors, curators and participants in the narratives that they seek out to explore. Their films exist on the periphery of typical classifications of this genre and this peripheral status allows them degrees of freedom that would otherwise not be possible with conventional methods. In animation, for example, they are able to draw upon specific aesthetic motifs or culturally located iconography that resonates with local audiences. Through interactivity they are able to tap into the participatory cultures and user-generated content to encourage polyvocality as a means to examine " truth " and in turn to question the authority of the author. Until recently, documentary filmmaking was often framed and discussed with reference to the practices that stemmed from early European observational cinema, its legacies of the referent and index (Barthes, 1981; Peirce, 1958) and the appeals of direct cinema. However as Jean Marie Teno points out even within fiction the presence of documentary value is found, as is often discussed in the context of those early African films such as Borom Sarret (1963) where characters played " real-life " roles in stories " rooted in the social and political context of the time " (Teno, 2016 p.108). This article will focus upon the " documentary value " of a range of formats such as the interactive and/or animated moving image in new media contexts across Africa that could be perceived to challenge these long-established conventions and simultaneously offer innovative aesthetic resources.
Animation draws upon a range of artistic practice, illustration, painting, sculpture, choreograph... more Animation draws upon a range of artistic practice, illustration, painting, sculpture, choreography and photography. This assemblage of forms is bound by the photographic as it effectively captures the sequence of images. There are a number of different ways in which a range of African animation artists engage with, or utilize the photograph within their practice illustrating the range and scope of methods that are employed. By focusing upon Kenyan N’gendo Mukii’s explorations of animated documentary such as Yellow Fever (2012), My Normal Kenyan Family (work in progress), Ethiopian Ezra Wube’s portfolio of animated paintings and South African artists Mocke Jansen van Veuren and Theresa Collins time-lapse experiments this article explores photographic practice within African animation.
This article aims to present an argument for why anthropology could provide animation studies wit... more This article aims to present an argument for why anthropology could provide animation studies with a new set of critical models that move away from the dominant paradigms that currently circulate in Western academic discourse. The author discusses how these models can be drawn upon when reading animation and she utilizes supporting examples of sub-Saharan animations to promote the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach to reading animation. This approach is bidirectional, flowing from anthropology to animation studies and the reverse. Where this article shows how animation theory stands to gain from anthropology, it will also illustrate how one can include animation in the visual anthropologist’s methodology.
This article broadly explores the relationship between non-indexical audio-visual formats and soc... more This article broadly explores the relationship between non-indexical audio-visual formats and socio-political commentary by focusing on the animated films of Congolese film-maker Jean Michel Kibushi. It uses a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on biographical information, the history of animation in Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, animation and African film theory, writing on Congolese popular culture and collective memory, and personal interviews with Kibushi. The article argues that Kibushi's films both mobilize local cultural forms and offer socio-political critique
Talks by Paula Callus
Locating Sub-Saharan African Animation within the ‘moving’ image.
The aesthetic mutability... more Locating Sub-Saharan African Animation within the ‘moving’ image.
The aesthetic mutability in animated film derives from a variety of artistic practices and allows for a more overt reference to pictorial qualities that are not exclusively located with the traditions of photographic ‘realism’. The animated films of migratory artists further compound this mutability by the different loci of aesthetic and narrative influence that inform their films, exhibiting a tension that results from these disparate sites of influence.
The contrasting examples of the animated films, presented in this paper, by Ezra Wube (Ethiopia), Shofela Coker and Ebele Okoye (Nigeria), are diverse animations that make particular use of moving image technologies. Their films exhibit different tensions; between locating their work within a ‘tradition’ of artistic practice and African filmmaking, and contemporary animation techniques.
Nonetheless they offer a new perspective within the wider discourses on ‘African’ animation and are significant to the documentation of a landscape of animation from this continent. The references to these animated films, positioned at the interstices of home and host country, at times described as ‘African’ and at other times ‘Diaspora’ can point to the multiple spaces that these films straddle, and consequentially the limitations of fixed concepts. In places these films can echo some of the qualities of Naficy’s ‘accented cinema’, whilst also presenting exceptional qualities that fall outside of specific definitions of the transnational. This premise sets the scene to consider the need for contemporary academic discourses to reflect upon the moving image in light of animation.
Reading animation through the eyes of anthropology; a case study of African animation
Ms Paula Ca... more Reading animation through the eyes of anthropology; a case study of African animation
Ms Paula Callus
Bournemouth University, NCCA
Keywords:
African animation
Visual anthropology
Animation theory
Abstract:
The talk aims to present an argument for why anthropology could provide animation theory with a new set of paradigms, and how it can be drawn upon when reading animation. It will utilize supporting examples of Sub-Saharan animations (Bazzoli 2003) to promote the benefits of a cross-disciplinary approach to reading animation. Whilst animation literature is now circulating within academic contexts, presenting animation as a study worthy of debate and reflection within popular culture and the arts (Buchan 2006), this literature remains largely self-referential in its uses of Western ideologies and theories. This talk will illustrate how anthropology can serve to warn the academic of the trappings of a belief in the centrality of Western thought (Said 1985). It will evidence, through the use of examples, how images are circulated, negotiated and understood on different terms within a local context. Animators that live within a post-colonial condition still wrestle with the tensions of making images that are freely self-driven versus those made to accommodate the Western expectation of an exotic equivalent that fits into the hegemonic myths surrounding the African continent (Oguibe 2004, Mudimbe 1992, Picton 1992). Anthropology frequently discusses the ideas surrounding the complicity of the West in creating and supporting a relationship of power and necessary difference, in order to assert its own standing as one of an authority on the subject. Judgments of taste and quality are made against a yard stick which the West holds up to the rest. As a consequence, it is easy to forget that aesthetic dimensions of taste are culturally distinct to different people, that the metaphors that circulate within narrative are also distinct, and that what we deem to be of merit and value does not always reflect all conditions (Kulick, Willson, 1994). This EurAm emphasis can belie the understanding of Sub-Saharan African animations as they would circulate and be engaged with on local terms.
References:
Bazzoli, Maria Silvia (2003), African Cartoons, Milano: Editrice Il Castoro.
Buchan, Suzanne (2006), “Editorial”, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, 1:1 p.1.
Kulick D., Willson M. (1994), “Rambo's Wife Saves the Day: Subjugating the Gaze and Subverting the Narrative in a Papua New Guinean Swamp” in Visual Anthropology Review, 10:2 pp 1-13
Said, E. (1985), “Orientalism Reconsidered”, in Cultural Critique, Volume 1, Autumn, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. pp 89-107
Askew, K., & Wilk, R. (Eds.). (2002), The anthropology of media. London: Blackwell.
Picton, John (1992), “Desperately seeking Africa”, Oxford Art Journal, 15 (2), pp. 104-112.
Oguibe, Olu (2004), “Play me the Other”, in The Culture Game, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mudimbe, Valentin Y. (1992), “More on African Art and Authenticity” in African Arts, 25(4), pp. 20, 22, 24.
Animation for most people tends to be synonymous with children's audiences. This is perhaps a myt... more Animation for most people tends to be synonymous with children's audiences. This is perhaps a myth which this talk aims to reframe by illustrating the very peculiarity in aesthetic and form that makes animation different to its indexical filmic cousin. These very differences can disarm a viewer allowing one to permeate into untapped audiences and deal with content that could be difficult to present in film or video.
The purpose of this talk is to illustrate the unique qualities of animation that make it not only an educationally strong tool, but one that can accommodate specific social, cultural or political content within the context of Sub-Saharan African countries. The subversive qualities discussed here serve to punctuate how animation can disarm the viewer, whether animation can be discussed in the light of documentary, and how it can reside easily within different culturally specific contexts.
The talk will include screenings and discussions of a selection of animations made by Sub-Saharan African animators, independently, commercially and through projects such as UNESCO's Africa Animated Project. Particular focus will be given to UNESCO's project; its ethos, structure, sustainability and outcome whilst looking at the long term benefits within the local context, Kenya.
An all day event consisting of a curated program of African animation screenings with a talk and ... more An all day event consisting of a curated program of African animation screenings with a talk and discussion on the material presented on the cultural context of production and the animated techniques employed in the films.
The second part of the event consisted of a four hour animation workshop with the participation of 30 secondary school children ranging between the ages of 11 to 14. Using under the camera stop-motion techniques such as cut-out and collage, the students created short animations to a soundtrack of West African playground children's songs.
A brief presentation and introduction to an overview of African animation that is being screened ... more A brief presentation and introduction to an overview of African animation that is being screened at the Africa in Motion Festival.
This project was a collaborative event that involved a series of workshops and lectures over the ... more This project was a collaborative event that involved a series of workshops and lectures over the span of 5 weeks to staff/ students at Hillview Primary by Paula Callus and Sofronis Esthathiou, with an aim to look at the use of animation tools within the learning environment.
Students completed a short animated film, using cut-out/collage direct animation, about the character Ferret Boy's trip to the moon. The film was entirely designed and developed through from concept, narrative to style and production, simulating the production pipeline within an animation studio, by the students themselves.
Conference Presentations by Paula Callus
By focusing specifically upon examples of Kenyan animation (moving images) and the related techno... more By focusing specifically upon examples of Kenyan animation (moving images) and the related technologies and practices of digital media this presentation considers the tactical positioning of Kenyan digital creatives that at once find themselves straddling subversion and complicity within the social and political systems they inhabit.
This paper focuses upon the rise of Kenyan political animation around and following the post-elec... more This paper focuses upon the rise of Kenyan political animation around and following the post-election violence in 2008. It positions cartoonist Godfrey Mwampembwa (GADO) as a key catalytic agent who was able to draw upon tactics (de Certau, 1984) to create a more hospitable climate for political critique in the arts and popular media. His work in cartooning informed his subsequent television series The XYZ Show and encouraged his peers’ political engagement through animation (drawing upon similar devices that appear historically within cartooning, such as caricature, parody, allegory and humor). It also served as a precursor to other subversive voices within the animated moving images in Kenya.
The political animations of Kenyan artists such as Musa Ihiga, Gatumia Gatumia, Peter Mute, Allan Mwaniki, Andrew Kaggia, and the art collective Just A Band, all present evidence of a use of tactics (de Certau, 1984) that re-position their work as not simply oppositional or critical. They are not constrained by a dichotomous reductive model of ‘within’ or ‘without’ and are able to straddle both spaces. The animations presented here work as a manipulation of ‘mechanisms of discipline’ within the systems that these artefacts intend to disparage. Therefore whilst these artists play with the conventions of animation, they are all too aware of the power structures that they must work within, and any discussion of subversion must involve to a degree considerations of adaptation and compliance for the dissemination of these moving images to be effective in their critique.
Certau, M. de (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkley: University of California Press.
Sub-Saharan Animation: The Internet as a Living Digital Archive
Digital technology has made p... more Sub-Saharan Animation: The Internet as a Living Digital Archive
Digital technology has made possible a shift in the understanding of an archive as material-based to a more ephemeral bank of digital information whether as sound, image (still or moving), or text. Through the Internet, the traces that emerge within the communities that inform this living archive take on rhizomatic qualities as they appear and disappear within this flexible network of data. Whilst this makes for an unstable and at times intangible collection, it has as in the case of Sub-Saharan animation allowed for the creation of a space that brings to light examples from various artists that capitalize on the uses and benefits that the technology offers. In so doing these African artists actively contribute to the creation of a digital animation content with a democratised distribution; where YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook become a gallery and exhibition space, and online bloggers the new curators of this work.
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Books by Paula Callus
Journal Papers by Paula Callus
Talks by Paula Callus
The aesthetic mutability in animated film derives from a variety of artistic practices and allows for a more overt reference to pictorial qualities that are not exclusively located with the traditions of photographic ‘realism’. The animated films of migratory artists further compound this mutability by the different loci of aesthetic and narrative influence that inform their films, exhibiting a tension that results from these disparate sites of influence.
The contrasting examples of the animated films, presented in this paper, by Ezra Wube (Ethiopia), Shofela Coker and Ebele Okoye (Nigeria), are diverse animations that make particular use of moving image technologies. Their films exhibit different tensions; between locating their work within a ‘tradition’ of artistic practice and African filmmaking, and contemporary animation techniques.
Nonetheless they offer a new perspective within the wider discourses on ‘African’ animation and are significant to the documentation of a landscape of animation from this continent. The references to these animated films, positioned at the interstices of home and host country, at times described as ‘African’ and at other times ‘Diaspora’ can point to the multiple spaces that these films straddle, and consequentially the limitations of fixed concepts. In places these films can echo some of the qualities of Naficy’s ‘accented cinema’, whilst also presenting exceptional qualities that fall outside of specific definitions of the transnational. This premise sets the scene to consider the need for contemporary academic discourses to reflect upon the moving image in light of animation.
Ms Paula Callus
Bournemouth University, NCCA
Keywords:
African animation
Visual anthropology
Animation theory
Abstract:
The talk aims to present an argument for why anthropology could provide animation theory with a new set of paradigms, and how it can be drawn upon when reading animation. It will utilize supporting examples of Sub-Saharan animations (Bazzoli 2003) to promote the benefits of a cross-disciplinary approach to reading animation. Whilst animation literature is now circulating within academic contexts, presenting animation as a study worthy of debate and reflection within popular culture and the arts (Buchan 2006), this literature remains largely self-referential in its uses of Western ideologies and theories. This talk will illustrate how anthropology can serve to warn the academic of the trappings of a belief in the centrality of Western thought (Said 1985). It will evidence, through the use of examples, how images are circulated, negotiated and understood on different terms within a local context. Animators that live within a post-colonial condition still wrestle with the tensions of making images that are freely self-driven versus those made to accommodate the Western expectation of an exotic equivalent that fits into the hegemonic myths surrounding the African continent (Oguibe 2004, Mudimbe 1992, Picton 1992). Anthropology frequently discusses the ideas surrounding the complicity of the West in creating and supporting a relationship of power and necessary difference, in order to assert its own standing as one of an authority on the subject. Judgments of taste and quality are made against a yard stick which the West holds up to the rest. As a consequence, it is easy to forget that aesthetic dimensions of taste are culturally distinct to different people, that the metaphors that circulate within narrative are also distinct, and that what we deem to be of merit and value does not always reflect all conditions (Kulick, Willson, 1994). This EurAm emphasis can belie the understanding of Sub-Saharan African animations as they would circulate and be engaged with on local terms.
References:
Bazzoli, Maria Silvia (2003), African Cartoons, Milano: Editrice Il Castoro.
Buchan, Suzanne (2006), “Editorial”, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, 1:1 p.1.
Kulick D., Willson M. (1994), “Rambo's Wife Saves the Day: Subjugating the Gaze and Subverting the Narrative in a Papua New Guinean Swamp” in Visual Anthropology Review, 10:2 pp 1-13
Said, E. (1985), “Orientalism Reconsidered”, in Cultural Critique, Volume 1, Autumn, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. pp 89-107
Askew, K., & Wilk, R. (Eds.). (2002), The anthropology of media. London: Blackwell.
Picton, John (1992), “Desperately seeking Africa”, Oxford Art Journal, 15 (2), pp. 104-112.
Oguibe, Olu (2004), “Play me the Other”, in The Culture Game, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mudimbe, Valentin Y. (1992), “More on African Art and Authenticity” in African Arts, 25(4), pp. 20, 22, 24.
The purpose of this talk is to illustrate the unique qualities of animation that make it not only an educationally strong tool, but one that can accommodate specific social, cultural or political content within the context of Sub-Saharan African countries. The subversive qualities discussed here serve to punctuate how animation can disarm the viewer, whether animation can be discussed in the light of documentary, and how it can reside easily within different culturally specific contexts.
The talk will include screenings and discussions of a selection of animations made by Sub-Saharan African animators, independently, commercially and through projects such as UNESCO's Africa Animated Project. Particular focus will be given to UNESCO's project; its ethos, structure, sustainability and outcome whilst looking at the long term benefits within the local context, Kenya.
The second part of the event consisted of a four hour animation workshop with the participation of 30 secondary school children ranging between the ages of 11 to 14. Using under the camera stop-motion techniques such as cut-out and collage, the students created short animations to a soundtrack of West African playground children's songs.
Students completed a short animated film, using cut-out/collage direct animation, about the character Ferret Boy's trip to the moon. The film was entirely designed and developed through from concept, narrative to style and production, simulating the production pipeline within an animation studio, by the students themselves.
Conference Presentations by Paula Callus
The political animations of Kenyan artists such as Musa Ihiga, Gatumia Gatumia, Peter Mute, Allan Mwaniki, Andrew Kaggia, and the art collective Just A Band, all present evidence of a use of tactics (de Certau, 1984) that re-position their work as not simply oppositional or critical. They are not constrained by a dichotomous reductive model of ‘within’ or ‘without’ and are able to straddle both spaces. The animations presented here work as a manipulation of ‘mechanisms of discipline’ within the systems that these artefacts intend to disparage. Therefore whilst these artists play with the conventions of animation, they are all too aware of the power structures that they must work within, and any discussion of subversion must involve to a degree considerations of adaptation and compliance for the dissemination of these moving images to be effective in their critique.
Certau, M. de (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkley: University of California Press.
Digital technology has made possible a shift in the understanding of an archive as material-based to a more ephemeral bank of digital information whether as sound, image (still or moving), or text. Through the Internet, the traces that emerge within the communities that inform this living archive take on rhizomatic qualities as they appear and disappear within this flexible network of data. Whilst this makes for an unstable and at times intangible collection, it has as in the case of Sub-Saharan animation allowed for the creation of a space that brings to light examples from various artists that capitalize on the uses and benefits that the technology offers. In so doing these African artists actively contribute to the creation of a digital animation content with a democratised distribution; where YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook become a gallery and exhibition space, and online bloggers the new curators of this work.
The aesthetic mutability in animated film derives from a variety of artistic practices and allows for a more overt reference to pictorial qualities that are not exclusively located with the traditions of photographic ‘realism’. The animated films of migratory artists further compound this mutability by the different loci of aesthetic and narrative influence that inform their films, exhibiting a tension that results from these disparate sites of influence.
The contrasting examples of the animated films, presented in this paper, by Ezra Wube (Ethiopia), Shofela Coker and Ebele Okoye (Nigeria), are diverse animations that make particular use of moving image technologies. Their films exhibit different tensions; between locating their work within a ‘tradition’ of artistic practice and African filmmaking, and contemporary animation techniques.
Nonetheless they offer a new perspective within the wider discourses on ‘African’ animation and are significant to the documentation of a landscape of animation from this continent. The references to these animated films, positioned at the interstices of home and host country, at times described as ‘African’ and at other times ‘Diaspora’ can point to the multiple spaces that these films straddle, and consequentially the limitations of fixed concepts. In places these films can echo some of the qualities of Naficy’s ‘accented cinema’, whilst also presenting exceptional qualities that fall outside of specific definitions of the transnational. This premise sets the scene to consider the need for contemporary academic discourses to reflect upon the moving image in light of animation.
Ms Paula Callus
Bournemouth University, NCCA
Keywords:
African animation
Visual anthropology
Animation theory
Abstract:
The talk aims to present an argument for why anthropology could provide animation theory with a new set of paradigms, and how it can be drawn upon when reading animation. It will utilize supporting examples of Sub-Saharan animations (Bazzoli 2003) to promote the benefits of a cross-disciplinary approach to reading animation. Whilst animation literature is now circulating within academic contexts, presenting animation as a study worthy of debate and reflection within popular culture and the arts (Buchan 2006), this literature remains largely self-referential in its uses of Western ideologies and theories. This talk will illustrate how anthropology can serve to warn the academic of the trappings of a belief in the centrality of Western thought (Said 1985). It will evidence, through the use of examples, how images are circulated, negotiated and understood on different terms within a local context. Animators that live within a post-colonial condition still wrestle with the tensions of making images that are freely self-driven versus those made to accommodate the Western expectation of an exotic equivalent that fits into the hegemonic myths surrounding the African continent (Oguibe 2004, Mudimbe 1992, Picton 1992). Anthropology frequently discusses the ideas surrounding the complicity of the West in creating and supporting a relationship of power and necessary difference, in order to assert its own standing as one of an authority on the subject. Judgments of taste and quality are made against a yard stick which the West holds up to the rest. As a consequence, it is easy to forget that aesthetic dimensions of taste are culturally distinct to different people, that the metaphors that circulate within narrative are also distinct, and that what we deem to be of merit and value does not always reflect all conditions (Kulick, Willson, 1994). This EurAm emphasis can belie the understanding of Sub-Saharan African animations as they would circulate and be engaged with on local terms.
References:
Bazzoli, Maria Silvia (2003), African Cartoons, Milano: Editrice Il Castoro.
Buchan, Suzanne (2006), “Editorial”, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, 1:1 p.1.
Kulick D., Willson M. (1994), “Rambo's Wife Saves the Day: Subjugating the Gaze and Subverting the Narrative in a Papua New Guinean Swamp” in Visual Anthropology Review, 10:2 pp 1-13
Said, E. (1985), “Orientalism Reconsidered”, in Cultural Critique, Volume 1, Autumn, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. pp 89-107
Askew, K., & Wilk, R. (Eds.). (2002), The anthropology of media. London: Blackwell.
Picton, John (1992), “Desperately seeking Africa”, Oxford Art Journal, 15 (2), pp. 104-112.
Oguibe, Olu (2004), “Play me the Other”, in The Culture Game, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mudimbe, Valentin Y. (1992), “More on African Art and Authenticity” in African Arts, 25(4), pp. 20, 22, 24.
The purpose of this talk is to illustrate the unique qualities of animation that make it not only an educationally strong tool, but one that can accommodate specific social, cultural or political content within the context of Sub-Saharan African countries. The subversive qualities discussed here serve to punctuate how animation can disarm the viewer, whether animation can be discussed in the light of documentary, and how it can reside easily within different culturally specific contexts.
The talk will include screenings and discussions of a selection of animations made by Sub-Saharan African animators, independently, commercially and through projects such as UNESCO's Africa Animated Project. Particular focus will be given to UNESCO's project; its ethos, structure, sustainability and outcome whilst looking at the long term benefits within the local context, Kenya.
The second part of the event consisted of a four hour animation workshop with the participation of 30 secondary school children ranging between the ages of 11 to 14. Using under the camera stop-motion techniques such as cut-out and collage, the students created short animations to a soundtrack of West African playground children's songs.
Students completed a short animated film, using cut-out/collage direct animation, about the character Ferret Boy's trip to the moon. The film was entirely designed and developed through from concept, narrative to style and production, simulating the production pipeline within an animation studio, by the students themselves.
The political animations of Kenyan artists such as Musa Ihiga, Gatumia Gatumia, Peter Mute, Allan Mwaniki, Andrew Kaggia, and the art collective Just A Band, all present evidence of a use of tactics (de Certau, 1984) that re-position their work as not simply oppositional or critical. They are not constrained by a dichotomous reductive model of ‘within’ or ‘without’ and are able to straddle both spaces. The animations presented here work as a manipulation of ‘mechanisms of discipline’ within the systems that these artefacts intend to disparage. Therefore whilst these artists play with the conventions of animation, they are all too aware of the power structures that they must work within, and any discussion of subversion must involve to a degree considerations of adaptation and compliance for the dissemination of these moving images to be effective in their critique.
Certau, M. de (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkley: University of California Press.
Digital technology has made possible a shift in the understanding of an archive as material-based to a more ephemeral bank of digital information whether as sound, image (still or moving), or text. Through the Internet, the traces that emerge within the communities that inform this living archive take on rhizomatic qualities as they appear and disappear within this flexible network of data. Whilst this makes for an unstable and at times intangible collection, it has as in the case of Sub-Saharan animation allowed for the creation of a space that brings to light examples from various artists that capitalize on the uses and benefits that the technology offers. In so doing these African artists actively contribute to the creation of a digital animation content with a democratised distribution; where YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook become a gallery and exhibition space, and online bloggers the new curators of this work.
Edward Said’s discussions of the ‘Other’ and the exotic in art provide a departure to examine the politics of identity in the moving images (film and animation) from the regions of the Middle East and Africa. The work of artists like Ezra Wube, Cilia Sawadogo, Bahman Ghobadi and Maryam Mohajer provide examples of the varied discourses that are entered into with audiences .The artist that moves across geographical spaces is positioned as both an outsider and insider in this age of transnational connections.
The question that is raised here is; ‘Do these practitioners engage in different conversations with a local audience as opposed to a Western audience, and if so how is this reflected in their work? The politics of identity and difference must therefore inform the discussion of these artists to frame the intervisual or hybrid aesthetic as a quality that may (in places) result from the artist’s awareness of the transnational nature of the market that they talk to.
By using the examples provided, the paper intends to readdress the notions of the exotic as something that not only locates the ‘Other’ to the West. Instead it invites the possibility to examine talking to a local audience of the diaspora. Furthermore there is scope to consider the liminal aesthetic as being able to talk in multiple directions. The analysis aims to illustrate how it is possible to escape the confines of a binary approach that presupposes the relationship as either one or the other, exotic or not, us and them, here and there.
The aesthetic mutability in animated film derives from a variety of artistic practices and allows for a more overt reference to pictorial qualities that are not exclusively located with the traditions of photographic ‘realism’. The animated films of migratory artists further compound this mutability by the different loci of aesthetic and narrative influence that inform their films, exhibiting a tension that results from these disparate sites of influence.
The contrasting examples of the animated films, presented in this paper, by Ezra Wube (Ethiopia), Shofela Coker and Ebele Okoye (Nigeria), are diverse animations that make particular use of moving image technologies. Their films exhibit different tensions; between locating their work within a ‘tradition’ of artistic practice and African filmmaking, and contemporary animation techniques.
Nonetheless they offer a new perspective within the wider discourses on ‘African’ animation and are significant to the documentation of a landscape of animation from this continent. The references to these animated films, positioned at the interstices of home and host country, at times described as ‘African’ and at other times ‘Diaspora’ can point to the multiple spaces that these films straddle, and consequentially the limitations of fixed concepts. In places these films can echo some of the qualities of Naficy’s ‘accented cinema’, whilst also presenting exceptional qualities that fall outside of specific definitions of the transnational. This premise sets the scene to consider the need for contemporary academic discourses to reflect upon the moving image in light of animation.
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