Geographies of the Wayward by Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan

[1Shanthiroad Studio]

Geographies of the Wayward

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan

In 1987, Angolan anthropologist Augusto Zita N’Gonguenho was discovered dead from a supposed car accident on a road in the desert of Southwestern Angola. 

In the aftermath of the civil war, he had been conducting research on colonial history and ecology in the region.
His project, ‘An Anthropology of Utopia: formation of Utopian Identities’, sought to understand the strange utopian impulses of colonization by using indigenous methods of
divination, collecting sounds, images and objects, exploring the connections between plants, animism, the desert and humans, all in a landscape of ruins marked by economies of extraction. 

His field notes were found in a South African military base at the end of Apartheid and given accidently to an Angolan sound artist and composer, Victor Gama.
Gama rendered these fragments as a multimedia artistic project on the life, work and death of Augusto Zita.

In the summer of 2022, Victor Gama built a temporary structure in Tombwa, Angola, to exhibit work from his long-term project on Augusto Zita. Gama invited (us), a group of anthropologists, historians, and artists, to join him in the desert to think with Zita and his life project. 

Conceived of as ‘bus as a method,’ our journey from Cape Town to Tombwa took us through multiple geographies and across borders. Throughout our journey, we stopped to share our work and ideas while meeting with local anthropologists, historians and cultural practitioners. 

This exhibition offers fragments from our itinerant journey that began in Cape Town and culminated in a colonial ruin in Tombwa, Angola. Centring an anticolonial, surrealist mode of encounter, I offer a speculative set of films, images, and text that emerge from our encounters with otherwise submerged archives. These texts, images, and sounds seek to trace what Black feminist theorist Katherin McKittrick describes as geographies of the wayward, those peripheral locations that are otherwise rendered
inconsequential to the unfolding of politics at various scales.

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1.Shanthiroad Studio/Gallery