Installation view
Colonialism without Colonies? Relations between Tourism, Neo-Colonialism
and Migration. Chapter 2: for example TEU: 8 feet x 20 feet
Shedhalle Zürich
In 1962 the Danish Ministry of foreign affairs established the Danish International
Development Assistance, Danida, with the purpose to coordinate the Danish
development aid. During the following 50 years, Denmark sent out so-called
”experts” to work in Danish and international projects in a number
of developing countries.
The experts left Denmark with certain expectations and ideas about the culture
they would meet. They applied very different strategies in the encounter with
the local situation. After having returned back home to Denmark, they had
to re-integrate their individual and specific experiences into their Danish
biography, and to mediate their experiences into the Danish context, which
mostly had little more than a generalised image of the places where the experts
had been. Of course visual material such as photographs and film were crucial
in this mediation process, towards a private, family audience, aswell as more
public audience at lectures and schools.
«The Expert, Part 1» is the first part of an ongoing project «The
Expert». The project works with image production and notions of the
African in a Danish perspective.
«The Expert, Part 1» looks at the approach to the local African
architecture. It is staged at a world bank secondary school in Zambia. 75
images of white shapes projected as a slide show on the black surface depicts
the building process of a pavilion in a teachers garden and includes a short
text introducing the situation and different persons. It is juxtaposed with
a wall painting showing a communal room in the school, 4 students are sitting
on a stage in front of a wallpainting of an African landscape in a theatrical
frame. The images are based on amateur photographs taken by former experts
in Zambia.