All Images © 2012
Justin Randolph Thompson
The work, created for the MADRE Museum on the occasion of the Giornata del Contemporaneo, doan yu tell no one I made it, is a super8 short film reflecting upon fragility and a resistant opposition to the idea of triumph. The film is a study divided into two scenes and narrated through two distinct sources on the inherent paternalism of Italian colonialism in Africa and, in contrast, the task that Africa assumes, in the words of Leopold Senghor, to humanize the West. The first source is a preface to Nell’Affrica Italiana written by Ferdinando Martini in 1891 and the second a speech given by Senghor in Florence in 1962. Two boxers shadow box, a hypothetical opponent under a triumphal arch and an activist and city councilor reads the speech that Senghor gave in the same place more than half a century ago, the Salone dei 500 in Palazzo Vecchio. The title of the short film refers to a phrase taken from Ezra Pound's Canti Pisani and evokes the disavowal of authorship. The work is the most recent chapter of the in-progress film Minted in Enemy Bronze.
With:
Leonard Bundu
Yosef Teklay
Antonella Bundu
Thelonious Stokes