single-channel HD video with sound 19 minutes
A Projective Geometry

ZACHARY FORMWALT
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An abandoned railway line stands at the center of A Projective Geometry. No longer in service, and having in some places entirely vanished, these tracks no longer enable the kind of movement for which they were originally constructed. Plans have been announced for their rehabilitation, so that they may once again serve as a means of transportation for among other things, the raw materials coming from some of the same mines that had originally determined the railway’s path. The first section of this railway had been built in the closing years of the nineteenth century, when Ghana was under British colonial rule. The railway was then seen as a conduit between the inland mines and Great Britain via the port of Sekondi. This conduit would allow for a specific type of circulation of goods produced in Britain and extracted from the colony. This circulation would provide both a market for British goods and a source of raw materials for British manufacture. It was, in other words, a typical colonial railway project.

The movement of goods through such a circuit is not what appears in A Projective Geometry. In place of this, an image produced by the man who carried out the railway survey, as a justification for the railway’s construction, appears. A petition by the local residents of Sekondi, which pits the interests of the local economy there against those of the British imperial economy, appears. The closing chapter of Capital appears, with its imagined “true colonies” that reveal the conditions of capitalism. While these images initially appear as an interruption in the filming of the abandoned railway, this relationship is inverted as the film progresses and the circumstances of the filming itself come into view.

 

 

2012