Louis Henderson

Night has fallen on a world on fire. Demonstrations, earthquakes, forest fires – fire is everywhere. The fires of struggles and pains, of rebirth and chaos. Men and women speak and despeak to honor the dead and save the living.

The lighthouse, as a man-made object built to shed light into the dark unknown, encapsulates perfectly the desires of the Enlightenment project of modernity: the domination of nature through reason and intellect, the advancement of technology and trade on a global scale, the illuminatory transparency of European Christian morality – a beacon in the dark. This 'op-film' will be a disorienting and disoccidenting dérive from optical navigation to algorithms of locating – an essay against the grain of Western patterns of referencing and situating. From a film made with lenses and ensitive celluloid to the desktop locating engine, we will navigate from the material production of Fresnel lenses to the invention of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) – the tool that announces the obsolescence of the lighthouse.

Lettres du Voyant is a documentary-fiction about spiritism and technology in contemporary Ghana, which attempts to uncover some truths about a mysterious practice called 'Sakawa' – internet scams mixed with voodoo magic. Tracing back the scammers’ stories to the times of Ghanaian independence, the film proposes Sakawa as a form of anti-neocolonial resistance. The film takes the form of a voyage to the end of the world, travelling through a network of digitised mine shafts that lead the viewer to each of the film’s locations; a gold mine, an e-waste dump, a voodoo ritual or a discotheque for example. A character recounts a story through reading a series of letters that he has written to the film’s author – letters that speak about the colonial history of Ghana, of gold, of technology.

This is a film that begins with the discovery, by a filmmaker, of a script long lost in a museum archive. The script is for a film that was made by the United Nations in 1957 about the Suez crisis. Due to objections from Israel and France the film was banned, and all the rights were bought back by the UN. The filmmaker travels to Egypt to scout for the original locations of the film, with a thought in mind of remaking it. Throughout his travels the filmmaker uncovers more history about the Egyptian people's resistance to colonial rule and invasion.

Reflecting on the legacy of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, "Ouvertures" follows a collective’s process of translating Édouard Glissant’s play Monsieur Toussaint from French to Creole.

In a spellbinding, textural blend of 16mm and HD video, Ana Vaz refracts the colonial history of Brazil and Portugal through objects, gestures, and contemporary customs.

Wandering from a study of the handwritten memoirs of Toussaint Louverture in the French National Archives to the prison cell in the Jura Mountains in which they were written, the film proposes an archaeology of the colonial history of France buried within its landscapes and institutions. The film dramatizes the escape of Louverture’s ghost from his castle prison into a form of marronage and errantry within the fields of snow and a dark baroque-like cave. The past is revisited in order to imagine an alternative future, and in doing so the film offers “a prophetic vision of the past.” We hear an echo, a spiral retelling.

In the year of his death, my great-uncle, the artist Nigel Henderson, wrote a letter addressed to my future self. In his letter, he asked me to decipher a painting he made of the fossilized cliffs at Walton on the Naze in Essex, in the east of England. As a clue, he sent me a photocopied manuscript of ​the novel “The Fourbanks of the River of Space” by ​the South American novelist Wilson Harris, who lived nearby. Afterthoughts of a Walk on the Naze is ​a​ quantum fiction that attempts to ​answer his letter. I revisit the house and studio where he made the painting and film the surrounding seascape/riverscape and the cliffs the painting references. Harris’ book, the landscapes and the painting work together in counterpoint, revealing ideas about artistic inheritance, creation, death, weather and time.

Louis Henderson’s Evidence of Things Unseen But Heard draws a relation between technologies of state surveillance against black communities in Bristol, the rise of sound system culture, and the exceptional character of “Bristol sound”. Shot around the St Pauls neighbourhood, while reflecting on Bristol’s history, which heavily rests on plantation labour and slavery, Henderson stitches a sonic archaeology through archival photographs of the St Pauls carnival and the direct aftermath of the riots of 1980.

A materialist and animist critique of European colonial history, reading the past as something entangled within the present, made up of living and dead elements. The Sea is History, made in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, is a free adaptation of the poem by Derek Walcott

As technological progress pushes forward in the overdeveloped world, enormous piles of obsolete computers are thrown away and recycled. Pushed out of sight and sent to the coast of West Africa these computers end up in waste grounds such as Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana. On arrival the e-waste is recuperated by young men, who break and burn the plastic casings in order to extract the precious metals contained within. Eventually the metals are sold, melted and reformed into new objects to be sold – it is a strange system of recycling, a kind of reverse neocolonial mining, whereby the African is searching for mineral resources in the materials of Europe. Through showing these heavy processes, the video highlights the importance of dispelling the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology to reveal the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins.

Black Code / Code Noir brings together various temporally and geographically disparate elements into a critical reflection on two recent events: the respective murders of Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell by police officers in Missouri, USA, 2014.