Working in sculpture, video, and performance, Francois Knoetze explores the life cycles of discarded objects and the historical intersections between materials and societies. Referring to himself as a “scavenger,” Knoetze collects and reassembles e-waste to make contaminated and concealed subjects that blur social, technological, extractive, and waste spaces. Core Dump is a series of videos set in Kinshasa, Shenzhen, New York, and Dakar—four cities intertwined in a complex web of fiber-optic cables, migratory patterns, conflicting histories, river systems, and trade routes. Originating from a project that traverses continents, the work explores the ecology of global information technology, including places of material origin, production, consumption, and distribution as well as disposal treatment, aiming to reveal the digital virtuality of capitalism. This journey surveys the possibilities of inverting the colonial culture of extraction by documenting it in the form of a fictional geopolitical map. Knoetze’s four videos incorporate a mixture of found footage, performance documentation, and interview transcripts that collectively portrays a digital nervous system on the brink of collapse amid a collision of uncertainty and unsustainability. In this work, video and audio forge a distinct sense of time and space while foregrounding notions of digital technology, cybernetics, colonialism, and the Non-Aligned Movement, thereby underlining human connection and the significance of narrative.
