Two short films by artist Louis Henderson:
The Sea Is History (2016, 28 min) enriches a search for a virtual next world after the colonial with maritime and animistic elements. Starting with a poem by author Derek Walcott, the film artfully breaks open various levels of the violent conquest of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Traces of the “creole” interdependence of yesterday and today, and the dead and the living, free up a view of a mythically charged underwater world in which there sleeps the force of a geopolitical reset. We can hear the sound of a “history that is now finally beginning.”
In Lettres du Voyant (2013, 40 min), set in Ghana, a “seer” describes his vision of reversed colonial history in lyric form. Between plundered gold mines, heaps of trashed electrical goods, and urban zones of survival, a virtual hybrid of internet magic and voodoo materialism emerges, and with it the seeds of a possible future.