A beautiful & intriguing journey in visual & sonic personification of Colonial evil.
In this mysterious 20 minute audiovisual experience, Igwe explores the colonial imprisonment of it’s hostages culture & history through the now derelict spaces they where once kept in. Igwe depicts these spaces as groaning and rumbling dusty spaces to reflect their once tiresome and evil duty of hiding the truth & pushing colonial propaganda for the good of the ‘Commonwealth’ . This is further depicted with stark images of these spaces, shown as cold grey lifeless spaces, holding not much but a few remains of old tape and writings lifted from the conquest of the British Empire. This is further exaggerated with sounds like reverse whistling sounds, to me this was one of my favourite elements of this piece, whistling to me connotes the concept of loitering, waiting around without a purpose, much like the remains of these defunct places, purposeless and irrelevant in there once so twisted prideful history. I think the reverse whistling sounds reflect that beautifully. Also the tense, almost horror film-like sounds and ambiences help to exaggerate the sinister past & purpose that these spaces/archives once represented. Almost like a graveyard or any sort of space that once lived, ghosts or demons. I think this intense spiritualisation of a space, especially when a space represents something evil, is very powerful as it helps to really put across the artists feelings towards the subject at hand, in this case colonialism.
The excerpts lifted from ‘Common Wealth FM’ was also very clever as the concept of using a radio archive as a big portion of the sound pallete of the piece in this instance reflects and parallels the visual depiction of these physical archives of what once was the so called ‘common wealth’. The words chosen and the repetition of certain phrases was brilliant as I believe it reflects a lot the tactics chosen by colonial evil to confuse the public, drilling into the heads of the masses certain ideology and propaganda, thickening the veil over the eyes of the masses.
Overall I found this showing a very inspiring and refreshing representation of the evils of empire, I enjoyed it as although it had a clear standpoint on colonialism it reflecting in a very observing way, showing more than telling. Excellent piece