video installation, 7:40 min.
The videos Europa, America, and Africa together comprise the video installation 3 Continents, showing Angolan artist
Nástio Mosquito confidently deliver three speeches addressing the respective continents. Behind him, improvised maps of the regions are stuck together: while the geography is recognizable, their larky construction lends the maps a playful character. Presented in a manner that is at once detached and rational, and also domineering and charismatic— much like a politician of standing reading out an official press release—Mosquito announces “I bought Europe” and “I bought the US of A”: their “pride,” “ignorance,” “comfort,” and their “simplicity of supremacy.” In these works the rituals of western-centric presentation are seamlessly adopted, albeit in the context of shabby open-air environs saturated in daylight. Through both environment and oration, Mosquito addresses the complex legacy and continuous contemporary reinforcement of the western logic of ownership and debt, and its consequences in terms of our way of thinking, talking, and understanding the biopolitical. Taking this calculative logic to its conclusion by stating that everything, including memory and sentiment, can be bought—or callously dismissed in the case of Africa in the work’s third part— Mosquito’s provocative dark humor emphasizes the mad fatalism of hegemonic rationales and their modes of propaganda. The work elicits a subtle though alarmed craving for humanity whilst looking upon a dysfunctional system dancing on the edge of a precipice.
