Francois Knoetze, Core Dump – Dakar 2018 (production still), photo credit: Anton Scholtz. Featuring Bamba Diangne
Francois Knoetze, Core Dump – Dakar 2018 (production still), photo credit: Mouhamadou Diene. Featuring Bamba Diangne
Francois Knoetze, Core Dump – E- Revenant 2018, photo credit: Zidan, Courtesy of the Execution Team of Cosmopolis 1.5. Chengdu (2018)
Francois Koetze, Core Dump – Kinshasa 2018, photo credit: Jean Babtiste Joire
Born Cape Town, South Africa (1989), lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa
Core Dump 2018 -2019
four-part video series, digital, 12.00 mins (each)
Courtesy of the artist
Artist’s statement
Core Dump is a series of videos set in Kinshasa, Shenzhen, New York, and Dakar— four cities intertwined through a complex web of fiber-optic cables, migratory patterns, conflicting histories, river systems, and trade routes. Originating from a project that traverses continents, the work explores the ecology of global information technology, including places of material origin, production, consumption, and distribution as well as disposal treatment, aiming to reveal the digital virtuality of capitalism. This journey surveys the possibilities of inverting the colonial culture of extraction by documenting it in the form of a fictional geopolitical map. The four videos incorporate a mixture of found footage, performance documentation, and interview transcripts that collectively portray a digital nervous system on the brink of collapse amid a collision of uncertainty and unsustainability.
In this cycle of work, video and audio forge a distinct sense of time and space while foregrounding notions of digital technology, cybernetics, colonialism, and the Non-Aligned Movement, thereby underlining human connection and the significance of the narrative.
François Knoetze’s work is included in CAPTCHA.
