Artist Statement

Other Realities sub-programme

Short film

Core Dump explores the place of screens in global and localised politics and history, looking specifically at the contradiction of Silicon Valley’s techno-utopianism and its impact on the low-tech manufacturing bases of Africa. The project comprises a series of performances, projection-mapping video installations, and interviews that draw from audiovisual archives, early African cinema and the daily life of the city of Dakar. In contrast to the spectacle of technological  singularity and the Western myth of progress, Core Dump considers the connections, disconnections and multiplicity of utopia through conflicting scales of value and waste. The first iteration of the video piece was produced over the course of 3 weeks while on residency at Ker Thiossanne. It was presented during Afropixel 6 and forms part of the first chapter of the Digital Imaginaries project, ‘Non-Aligned Utopias’. The video presented at WAM is a work in progress that will be further developed in Kinshasa, DRC in July 2018 and at ZKM, Germany in November 2018.                             deskgram.net/p/1839081412231608708_2916462023

• Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1989, Francois Knoetze is a performance artist, sculptor and filmmaker. He holds a BA Fine Arts degree from Rhodes University and an MFA from Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT. Knoetze retraces the life cycles of discarded objects and explores junctures between material and social histories. In 2015 Knoetze featured as one of Mail & Guardian’s ‘Top 200 Young South Africans’. His series Cape Mongo formed part of the Grahamstown National Arts Festival Main Programme in 2015 and the Global Graduate Programme at Design Indaba 2016.  francoisknoetze.carbonmade.com

Support from Mouhamadou Lamine Barro Diene, Ker Thiosanne, ZKM, Afropixel, Digital Imaginaries, WAM.