Slow Drift(s) CHPT2
Larry Achiampong & David Blandy
NOV.29. - FEB.15.2025
WITH WORKS BY Larry Achiampong & David Blandy.
OPENING
Friday NOV.29, 19:00 - 23:00
During HOOGTIJ#79
ON VIEW
NOV.29.—FEB.15.2025
Fri-Sat: 13:00-18:00
Mon-Thu by appointment
What does it mean to inherit a conversation? How do you tell a story that does not want to be told? Language, theater, dialogue, metaphor. In the Finding Fanon Trilogy, Larry Achiampong and
David Blandy weave storylines of the artists’ genealogy, colonial histories, and reflections on their friendship, all connected through a poetic engagement with the lost plays of Martinican philosopher and psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). Fanon’s many lives and forceful prose examined how the consequences of colonization manifest pathologically.
Achiampong and Blandy’s attention to Fanon’s dramatic sensibility (an often-overlooked dimension of his work) sheds light on self-making as a process of constant identification and role-playing, over and against the backdrop of colonial structures. For Fanon, theater was the dimension of language where we could continually (re)create ourselves in relation to the world. Theater is the space where one can enact the choice to be. The artists mobilize these ideas through their characterization of the different ‘roles’ at play in the drama of the colonial encounter: him, the other, the settler, Fanon’s ghost—brought to life not in Fanon’s mid-20th century, but amidst the forces of globalization and technocracy.
Featuring a tapestry of archival material from British colonial rule in Kenya, family archives, footage of industrial manufacturing, and protests against police brutality, Finding Fanon One montages images and words to trace the intertwinement of language and the prospect of liberation.
In Finding Fanon Two, the dramatic formation of the self unfolds in the virtual worlds we build. Shot within the Grand Theft Auto V in-game video editor, two avatars—dressed in tweed suits similar to those worn by the artists in the first chapter—journey through the deserted, fictional U.S. state of San Andreas, as if searching for the edges of this world. “Is Fanon here?” they ask. Can his thinking diagnose the social conditions in this game space as it does those outside it? Algorithms are shaped by racial logics; racial logics operate like algorithms do. Finding Fanon Three returns to a song of intergenerational resonance, blending reflections on a recognizable earlier version of the internet with wishes and warnings for their children. The Achiampong and Blandy families act as travelers in a quest plot, traversing landscapes that, like those in computer graphics, are textured, optimized, and full of information. “This water is hope and death,” says the narrator. The journey, however, is also about survival and the struggle toward alternatives—for beyond a structural diagnosis of colonialism, Fanon’s (dramatic) writings hold the promise that a different reality is possible: “In the world I am heading for, I am endlessly creating myself...”.
Slow Drift(s) is a film and video exhibition program that brings together the work of established and emerging filmmakers, exploring the fluid nature of expanded cinema. We begin by inviting an artist with a relevant filmography to exhibit. Then, local and regional collectives are invited to curate their own screenings in response, which complement and challenge our selection. This approach broadens the medium’s associative possibilities in content and aesthetics, while connecting artists at various career stages.
Expanding the defined boundaries of the exhibition as a single event, we have invited film collective First Cut (Cyan Bae, Hattie Wade and Cristina Lavosi) to develop a screening program responding to Achiampong & Blandy’s selected works. The screening will take place on the 11th of January 2025.
ABOUT
Since March 2018 The Balcony curates exhibitions supporting the presentation of upcoming practices with a focus on alternative formats of display, keen on collaborations and cross-generational presentations. The initiative was previously hosted in the vitrine of a violin store, originally known as The Balcony (2018 – 2020), as well as the basement of a former office space, previously known as Susan Bites (2019 – 2021).
In 2021 the initiative relocated to a permanent location in the city centre at Nieuwe Molstraat 14-A2, hosting an exhibition space and artist studios. Starting from September 2023 The Balcony is curated by Arthur Cordier (b.1993. BE), Valentino Russo (b.1994. IT) as well as Abril Cisneros Ramirez (b. 2001. MX), Marica Kolcheva (b.1986. BG) and Ariane Toussaint (b.1996. FR), who recently joined the team to expand the curatorial and public program. The team warmly thanks the artists for making this exhibition possible, Stefan Bandalac (SBAE) for the technical partnership and graphic designers Pavlo Radich and Julia Waraksa from STAATSDUET. Members of the initiative support the programme on a project and often on a voluntary basis, your support is appreciated.
The Balcony
Nieuwe Molstraat 14-A2
The Hague, NL