KOCHI: Shouldn’t Europe and America apologise for letting smartphones virtually swallow the entire mankind?
Young artist Tabita Rezaire raises this question at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale through her work ‘Sorry for Real Sorrow’ showcased at Aspinwall House.
Calling herself an “agent of healing”, the 29-year-old French Guyana-based Tabita says, “The work seeks to capture the violent histories of slavery and colonialism, alongside a continued exploitation of African and indigenous bodies, lands and knowledge.” She says a new form of colonialism has simply replaced the old. “We are heading towards Internet Colonisation,” she says.
‘Sorry for Real Sorrow’ is a series of five light boxes highlighted by the artist’s holographic apology on behalf of the Western world. Paris-raised Tabita presents a cyber exchange that addresses the West’s history of imperialism and the need to decolonise existing technologies and reconciliation strategies. The work stems from a lot of anger, when she understood the social, political and economic scope of it.
“The way technology is taking charge across the world is very similar to colonialism,” she says.
To Tabita, most of the technology corporate giants from the West control humanity’s day-to-day activities. For instance, Facebook, Google and Twitter have “all our personal data”. This, when the Internet was originally created as a surveillance instrument, she says.
“Today, we are in a fight to save our sensitive details. In a way, the Internet has made us desperate for connecting with each other,” she says.
Research for the work led Tabita to stumble upon a curious discovery: it’s along old colonial shipping routes the world today has its undersea optical fibre cables laid, connecting humanity through the Internet.
“When colonialism began, they argued they were connecting us to the New World, when all that was happening was actually exploitation of resources and, in the process, looting other countries, expanding wealth,” she says. “It’s the same today. Big corporates from the West are stealing our data to expand the wealth of their empires,” she says.
Tabita, also a health-tech-politics practitioner and Kemetic/Kundalini Yoga teacher, creates digital encounters that offer substitute readings to dominant narratives. In the stories the new-media artist presents, the process of listening, seeing and witnessing can be potentially transformative.
“Only around 51 per cent of the whole world is connected to the Internet. In Africa, Internet penetration is only 31 per cent. Within each country, the way you access the Internet and the content you can access is very different.”
At her Biennale project, Tabita did a performance seeking to unearth the possibilities of decolonial healing through the politics of technology.