The coloring book and existing fairy tales may be his most important inspiration, but there are more influences. His work is a tribute to folk art because of the imagery, the setting and the absence of nuance. It also refers to the comic book tradition. When you see a presentation of Bankston’s work, it reads like a comic strip, it reads like a coherent story with a scene on every page. With one big difference: the viewer has to ‘write’ his own text.
Her endeavor at writing with light or rather writing herself into being, being black, blacks out in the face of her existential predicament. Instead of offering a critical reflection on negrophobia, Muholi’s game of parody gets entangled in negrophilia. This isn’t to disavow the potentiality of subversion, but to note the risky slippage of it subsidizing the already existing white jouissance. From this point of view, activism meets stasis.
“Suffering feels like coals that burn on your skin. That’s what I do with paper. I paste multiple layers of different types of paper onto each other and then I burn holes in it with coals.” Oussou stresses: “Remember, without suffering there is no happiness.”
Fast aims to question the way a recollection can be a construction, rather than a fact. It gives him freedom to embrace complex storytelling, and as he interweaves the fantastical with the mundane his movies become confrontational, they question the humanity, or the lack of it, in today’s global conflicts.