Metabolic Grammars

The Otolith Group, MASCON. A Massive Concentration of Black Experimental Energy (still), 2024. Courtesy and copyright the artists.

This week, Film Notes publishes “Metabolic Grammars,” Abirami Logendran’s essay on how films and installations by diasporic artists give form to identities and traditions that are remade through displacement.

In “Minimal Selves” (1987), written out of his own experience of moving from Jamaica to Britain, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall describes migration as a one-way journey. The place one leaves does not remain available, because it does not stay as it was—it constantly transforms. Identity, in Hall’s account, which he further emphasizes in the essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1990), is therefore a hybrid formation, never complete, continuously produced through displacement and new encounters. Retelling the past, or giving an account of the place one left, always involves selection and interpretation, and meaning-making is shaped by contemporary concerns and perspectives. We narrativize the past through fantasy, memory, and myth, which means that there is a creative potential to a retelling.1

I take the title of this essay from nature. Metabolism is a continuous process where materials are broken down and reconstituted, retaining traces of their origins while becoming something else. In moving image works by diasporic artists, this kind of recombination into something new seems to be quite a common aesthetic strategy. The retelling that Hall describes does not necessarily appear in the image itself, but it happens between images—in the cuts and edits. Switching, repeating, mistranslating, and layering are the conditions of multiple belonging as well as editing operations.

Take the works of the Palestinian artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. For their solo exhibition at Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo in 2023, they presented a multi-channel video installation, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth: Only sounds that tremble through us (2022), in a gallery filled with colourful light. It consisted of found videos of songs and dances from Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, material the artists had collected from internet repositories such as YouTube during periods of political upheaval. The extensive collection was then edited down and restaged by Abbas and Abou-Rahme and projected onto the gallery walls and freestanding screens. However, modules and barriers of different sizes were deliberately placed in the room, between the projector and the walls, breaking up each image into several different frames, disrupting anything close to a complete picture.

The fragmentation of the moving images across several surfaces seemed to mirror the fact that cultures, landscapes, lives, and traditions have been damaged or destroyed by years of war, occupation, and trauma. In “Diasporic Remix,” his review of the exhibition for Kunstkritikk, Nicholas Norton read the work through a concept that describes not only damage but what is produced by it: Édouard Glissant’s creolization.2 The term describes how cultures emerged when enslaved Africans, taken to plantations in the West Indies, South America, and the United States, brought religions, languages, and practices that mixed over time with each other and with European and Indigenous cultures. The resulting culture is pluralistic by force: with so many commingling traditions, no single one can be claimed as authentic, and no coherent heritage is recoverable from them. Glissant extends the term beyond its Caribbean history, treating creolization as a process unfolding around the world.3

This thinking about the aesthetics of creoliation returned to me this summer when revisiting the film MASCON: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy (2024) by The Otolith Group as part of the exhibition “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” at the Barbican. Structured as an audiovisual essay, it is composed from the gestures and grammars of the films of Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty, made between 1963 and 2004. The film’s own method seems to be masking: images cut out of their frames and set against each other. In one longer segment, shots of hands from different films are intertwined through editing. Sometimes they are woven seamlessly into a single layered image, but other times whole frames are stacked, cascaded, or mosaicked across the screen, almost like a multichannel work is held inside a single channel.

The hands do things like breaking rocks, telling beads, playing instruments, or sowing seeds around the carved hollows of an awalé board. Sometimes the compositing makes hands from different times and spaces touch: a finger in one layer comes down and meets a palm in the layer beneath. In MASCON, these hands are no longer attached to the films, the decades, or the nations they came from. The editing produces borderlessness through a simple set of common gestures, and the Pan-African claim of the work (and the exhibition as a whole) is carried by the form rather than stated by it.

In “Sounds Authentic: Black Music, Ethnicity, and the Challenge of a ‘Changing’ Same” (1991), Paul Gilroy argues that sampling, montage, and the radical unfinishedness of Black musical forms are consequences of the historical experience of slavery and diaspora. The title takes up a phrase from Amiri Baraka, who in 1966 described the new Black music as “the changing same”—a tradition recognizable across its own transformations.4 Gilroy keeps the phrase and shifts its weight. His most precise formulation comes late in the essay, where he proposes approaching the music as a changing rather than an unchanging same, and specifies what that asks of a critic: to understand the reproduction of traditions not as the untroubled passage of a fixed essence through time, but in the breaks and interruptions themselves.5 Tradition survives in the discontinuities. Gilroy is writing about music, but the claim is about form. What MASCON shows is that the discontinuity is not only where culture survives, but where it is continuously made.

Last autumn I curated “Counter-Rhythmic Pulses” for e-flux Screening Room, a program presented as part of the African Film Institute. With works by Onyeka Igwe, Jyoti Mistry, and Christian Nyampeta, the three films shared a formal, aesthetic intervention into archival images and source material, negotiated through a diasporic relationship to that material. In each case, the intervention was connected to rhythm: what gets repeated, what gets held, and what gets cut against what.

Jyoti Mistry’s Loving in Between (2023) is based on material from different European film archives, particularly the Eye Filmmuseum’s collection. The film takes as its premise the Langston Hughes’s poem “Advice,” in which he suggests loving in the interval between birth and death, as well as Audre Lorde’s proposition that the erotic is a power capable of emancipation. Found footage is looped, repeated, slowed and sped up, animated over, and cut to the pace of a spoken-word soundtrack. The line “no blacks, no arabs, no spice, no rice, no curry” is repeated, each time landing on a new image, changing its meaning. It is in the editing that the premise is tested; what the rhythm carries is desire, held against footage that was never shot to hold it.

In Specialised Technique (2018), Onyeka Igwe leaves her interventions to the image visible. The footage comes from the Colonial Film Unit, whose house style was set out by William Sellers as a specification for how Africans should be filmed: slow edits, no camera tricks, and minimal camera movement.6 Igwe draws on this material from some of the hundreds of films, specifically of women dancing. She then breaks every term of the specification and makes the breaking both audible and visible. The images are drawn over, reanimated frame by frame, slowed and tripled, the sound distorted. The alterations are the evidence of a trajectory that now runs through her too, and to state that clearly, at one point she projects the archival scenes onto the skirt she is wearing and dances with the women in the footage.

Christian Nyampeta’s Sometimes It Was Beautiful (2018) places the intervention somewhere different. Here the switching happens not between shots but between genres. A group gathers to watch and discuss footage filmed by the Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist in the Congo between 1948 and 1952, in the mode of communal viewing suggested by Ousmane Sembène. From there, the film moves into a reimagining of Nykvist’s own childhood, into role-play, and further into passages of movement and dance. The work never resolves into one coherent form, but rather approaches the colonial footage from different angles.

What struck me seeing these three works together was how each of them holds together as a changing same. Stuart Hall emphasized that identity is not an accomplished fact that cultural practices then represent. It is a production, “always constituted within, not outside, representation.”7 The remixing, layering, and masking seen in the works mentioned above are not mere illustrations of a diasporic condition; they give it a form. Grammar, in its classical sense, names the rules by which meaning is generated from discrete parts—in moving images, from shots, frames, sounds, and so on. What I mean by metabolic grammars, then, is not a stable syntax applied to unstable material, but rules that break down and reconstitute along with the images they organize.