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.
