Marisa Morán Jahn, Bibanda (Bootleg Video Halls)
Marisa Morán Jahn, Bibanda (Bootleg Video Halls)

Marisa Morán Jahn | Video Slink Uganda

2014

Video Halls (or “bibanda”) are often no more than small huts where viewers pay a few cents to watch pirated DVDs on diesel-powered television screens. In the majority of villages and towns, they are the only form of popular visual entertainment, reaching millions of Ugandans every month and hundreds of thousands each day—more than television and newspapers put together. “VJs” (or “video jockeys”) translate Hollywood actions, Nollywood dramas, Bollywood musicals, cartoons, and porn into the primary local language of Luganda. Acting as translators, stand-up comedians, and carney barkers, VJs thus operate as nodes of distribution to the bibanda.

Initiated by artist Marisa Morán Jahn with media ethnographer Paul Falzone, Video Slink Uganda is an apex art and Creative Capital-supported project that involves translating and burning — “slinking”— experimental art by Ugandan and US diasporan artists onto bootleg DVDs, seen by millions of viewers as previews to the main film, and circulated throughout Uganda’s bootleg cinemas. Participants include VJ Junior, VJ Emmie, and VJ Jingo adapting/translating/re-interpreting the works of artists of the African diaspora: Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky, Rashaad Newsome with Kenya Robinson, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Kamau Patton, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Hank Willis Thomas/Terence Nance, and Saya Woolfalk.

Artwork produced within a Western paradigm of commodity production typically controls the distribution, reproduction, and profits of the work. In doing so, a certain stability is ensured; this system of exclusion in fact produces what Jacques Derrida refers to as the ‘bastard’: “Bastards appear and (disappear) to enact impropriety. Accordingly, the bastard might be named ‘impropriety itself’ […] Bastards, however, cannot be named properly and the one thing impropriety cannot be is one thing.”

By comparison, cultures built upon a largely informal economy thrive on piracy and derivation as an inevitable force with its own set of tacit rules. Here, the illegitimate (the bastard) is not disavowed. Instead, the copy, bootleg, or knockoff becomes the currency itself, and increasing degrees of degradation, remove, or infidelity in fact heighten the work’s authenticity. Privileged here are translation and adaptation — skills honed in informal markets — as opportunities for disruption.

 

Video Slink seeks to question how narratives and power are transmitted, translated, regenerated, and forged anew. How can we share power and expand who gets to create meaning?

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