Audiovisual artefacts: the African politics of moving image loss

Abstract

ABSTRACT Artefacts are human-made objects deemed culturally and historically significant. But they are also those scratches, burns and glitches that appear on audiovisual screens due to poor projection, improper storage or faulty processing. They are those unwanted additions that visualise the presence of loss. This paper explores the politics of audiovisual loss by looking at the history of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation film collection’s demise alongside the 2020 films by Onyeka Igwe – a so-called archive and No Archive Can Restore You – that feature a similar collection in Nigeria. Igwe’s exploratory camera floats around the Nigerian Film Corporation building documenting the filmic carnage within its vaults, reminding audiences that archival horror lies in the “colonial residue” of the archive’s architecture. Artefacts of decay in Igwe’s films, that mark the elimination of information from the image that restoration seeks to renew, are not the result of inaction, but acts of refusal. Film artefacts not only mark loss but are also traces of postcolonial affect. As such, I argue that archival neglect and the losses that it produces may also be acts of archival labour – an articulation of artefacting.