Meta is a quarterly online magazine of Art & Science. Focusing on the intersections of culture and nature, we showcase visionary projects, articles and views into the abyss of visual information.
For each issue, different writers, artists, scientists, architects and journalists are invited to collaborate. The contributions are then catalogued by categories such as Art, Language, Future, Ecology, Power, Camouflage, Icon, Sex and Evidence. Combining the main and subcategories is an individual reading experience and an act of connotative thinking.
Meta's growing content is made up of photography, insights, essays, interviews and obscurities. As with the historical cabinet de curiosités, Meta's selective principle is based on personal interest rather than discursive criteria.
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Welcome to Nollywood
Text by Emilie Bromberg
When META spoke with photographer Pieter Hugo about his work, he pointed out the comedy of an inquiry often posed to him: "So, is Africa your thing?“ The 32-year-old Cape Town native is of European decent but has no European relatives, as his family has been in South Africa for generations. He is African and the majority of his portraiture is produced in African countries. So whether Africa is his thing or not, Hugo provides spotlight views into the Dark Continent, shedding some light on very specific national and cultural facets.
His career, which got its jump-start as Colors magazine’s
‘guy in Africa’, shows a long run of progressive reportage. An autodidact photographer, Hugo began his journalistic work for Colors, a project created in the early 90’s by the Benetton Group's research center, Fabrica. Under designer Tibor Kalman's direction, the publication joined journalism and graphic design in pioneering a style that sharply highlights the art of reality. This style successfully tread the border between aesthetic and journalistic representation, blurring the divide between sheer document and what is beautifully, surreally and bizarrely inherent to real life.
This borderland is an interesting territory for Hugo, whose most recent project, “Nollywood”, explores Nigeria’s answer to big siblings Holly- and Bollywood. The West African film industry has surpassed its predecessors in terms of annual productions. These go straight to DVD and are sold in shocking volume at prices which suit the average African income. In this manner, Nollywood has grown from nothing into a $300 million dollar plus enterprise within 16 years.
Hugo was fascinated by the enthralled Nollywood audiences, as well as the industry’s ability to churn out b-movie hits with miniscule budgets and available resources. Films are often made within a few week's time. Their being shot in borrowed spaces and in the midst of real life scenes subtracts the highly stylized studio quality of big budget films and adds an air of truth to such varied genres as romance, drama, crime, religion, urban legend, horror, ‘70’s-style blaxploitation and mythic parable.
So, Hugo went to Lagos. At first the intention was to recreate actual film scenes for a photographic series, but after witnessing the rapid-fire environment and ad hoc production methods, the images began to take on a life of their own when left up to the chance occurrences of spending time with the actors. He discussed moments like sharing a Coke with a werewolf and visiting a slaughterhouse early in the morning to borrow a cow’s heart as some of the more enjoyable of these chance moments, which lent themselves to fantastic photographs.
Hugo was uninterested in deconstructing the images for us - and with good right – but their references to mythology such as the Legends of the Twins, and their touching on practices of juju, a West African blend of voodoo, fetishism and sacrifice, also exemplify this straddling of the real and the superstitious present in many Nollywood features.
Himself a fan of science fiction, Hugo is attuned to the border between what really happens and what could quite possibly happen in a slightly parallel world. Science fiction in the David Cronenberg sense has been an influential force for the artist. Thanks to the collaborative genius of Nollywood make-up artist Gabazzini Zuo, this boundary between real and ‘looks so real’ could also be conjured up in Hugo’s series. So, while the work is made there and in close connection with the Nigerian film industry, it is not a document of the movies, but an extension of their success in treading this territory between fiction and non.
Junior Ofokansi, Chetachi Ofokansi, Mpompo Ofokansi.