1997, 05:30 minutes, colour, English
TAPECODE 236.02
Foodland was shot in Zimbabwe on Hi 8, and edited on Betacam SP at Charles Street Video in Toronto, Canada.
Foodland begins with figures moving in a mysterious beautiful landscape. Could it be Africa: Elemental, dusky light, fire… What are they doing? Is it some kind of ritual…?
An abrupt formal shift mirrors a psychic reality: a violence of elision, erasure; a separation of realms of knowledge and experience. What’s getting lost, made invisible here? Is the problem with the medium, the camera person? Or is it the way we read the image here in North America, privileging certain kinds of knowledge (factual, material based, information based) and unconsciously erasing others…
The structure is similar to that of a game that the viewer can enter: the polarized, either/or duality is a question that should have an answer; a problem that should have a solution; an equation that one should be able to solve.