"Mascon is an “audiovisual investigation into the gestures, geometries, grammars, and geographies that compose the forms and forces of the films of Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty.”
Mascon consists of a mosaic of images drawn from the works of these two Senegalese directors, prominent figures among a generation of African auteurs whose films explored the emancipatory movements that swept across the continent in the late 1950s and early ’60s. According to the Otolith Group, their homage to these filmmakers “summons the borderless imagination of the cine-Sahel,” amplifying and distilling Sembène’s and Mambéty’s favored motifs in order to elicit what American literary scholar Stephen Henderson termed “mascon” (shorthand for “a massive concentration of black experiential energy”)".
Written by Dieter Roelstraete
35.34 mins, HD video, colour, sound
Commissioned by Dieter Roelstraete and the Neubauer Collegium
