PILLAR 03 · FILM
ABANDONMENT: What We Left Behind.
An Anaphora Films production, with Orphan Matter as executive producer, in collaboration with the African Artists' Foundation. Currently in production.
In a Cape Town studio, the Congolese artist Maurice Mbikayi builds bodies, masks and garments from the keys, boards and cables of dead machines, the same machines the world ships south to die. ABANDONMENT follows him as he traces that matter back to where it comes from, and forward into the art he makes of it, asking one question of a civilization that has learned to throw away: can what we reject become the very thing that reveals who we are?
SYNOPSIS
Three movements, one studio.
The film opens with a man and his work. In a studio in Cape Town, Maurice Mbikayi lifts a circuit board to the light as if reading a map, and tells us, in image and gesture before any narration, how a near-fatal fall, years in an abandoned building, and a repairman's pile of dead electronics set the course of his life.
From the studio the film follows the matter outward, to its source: the e-waste economy, and further back to the mineral ground of the Congo and the colonial history that made his continent both the source of the world's technology and the destination for its remains. Then, in the studio, the reversal: Maurice, with Ozuma Patrick Chidiebube and Afrane Makof in his constellation, listens to abandoned matter and returns it to body, memory, ritual and presence.
WHY SIFISO KHANYILE
An archivist's instinct, a documentarian's eye.
Sifiso Khanyile is a South African filmmaker whose work (Uprize!, A New Country and The Reclaimers) has been built on exactly the material this film requires: memory, archive, and the way colonial and political history keeps shaping the present. The Reclaimers turns its attention to those who recover value and meaning from what a society has discarded, the very gesture at the centre of Maurice's art.