LoDef Film Factory is an artmaking community initiative founded in 2019 by Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson in South Africa. Their projects explore local narratives through low budget productions that place an emphasis on the transmission of ideas and experience rather than high production value, deploying methodologies such as archival research, dramaturgy, and visual strategies that are associated with mediums of video, collage, sculptural installation, and virtual reality. Representing a collaboration between researchers, artists, and thinkers from various African countries, the VR work The Subterranean Imprint Archive proposes a counterarchive that traces the legacy of technopolitics in Central and Southern Africa and thematizes the toll of a progressdriven worldsystem across the continent. Beginning in the Shinkolobwe mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where uranium was extracted for use in the Manhattan Project during World War II, the work engages with the history of mapping for the purpose of resource extraction dating back to the nineteenth century, the exploitation of the African continent to facilitate the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, and the largely hidden consequences of such enterprises on African territories, ecosystems, and populations.
