Dark Matter responds to ‘Epidemic threats and racist legacies’

I'm now Senior Lecturer in Fashion Communication at Brighton University, where the movement to decolonise the curriculum is at the forefront of our minds. It is increasingly a consideration of the way we teach, and what we teach. 

The following short films were created in response to ‘Epidemic threats and racist legacies‘, written by Jacob Steere-Williams. Titled ‘Ivory Tower’ and ‘Macroscopic’, these films allowed me to explore the subject of physical, social and cultural representations of African and colonised people, in the context of decolonising medical history, refuting outdated expectations and looking with a clearer-eyed focus on wrongful attitudes and treatment. 

Ivory Tower

Queen Victoria looks out at her cannons blazing across her empire. So begins a symbolic journey through colonised territories, doctors engaging problematically with local children and holding presence in Indigenous communities. In tandem with this critical lens, a subversive voice makes itself known: elements interact to subvert, interrupt and disengage problematic subjects from their patients, so that cultural pride and magnificence stands alone, defiant, at the close of the film.

Macroscopic

In territories where Indigenous peoples had dealt with and treated infections and diseases for millennia, the external eye of the British Empire declared them to be dirty and dangerous. In this second, shorter film, the microscope’s eye is the colonist’s eye as we go down the rabbit hole of the lens and witness the perception of how diseases were said to grow and spread through the empire.