Gambia, Africa, a walled-in compound. Men are put up against the wall. Hands behind your heads. Hands behind your backs. On your knees! One after the other, they go through the motions of a universally familiar choreography of obedience and submission. Their master? The camera. Cut. Transplanted into an abstract visual space, the same black bodies return on a digital stage before a white backdrop like the graphic elements of an increasingly ornamental, dehumanized composition, forming patterns, grids, circles.
The action in the picture is almost drowned out by a voice, the voice of Europe. It is the voice of Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, the second-most important person in Brussels. In 2022, it became publicly known that Borrell had given a speech in which he had called Europe a garden and the rest of the world a jungle that needed to be brought under control. It was a textbook-ready specimen of racism and colonialism, an instant classic of the genre. Sierra replays it in a loop, again and again; at first you don’t believe your ears, then you get sick to your stomach.
Sierra’s project is carefully calculated. His film and accompanying photographic works were created in collaboration with players of the Gambian football team Tallinding United, who performed for The Maelstrom. Among the sources of inspiration for the choreographic arrangements were the principles of Busby Berkeley, the influential Hollywood choreographer and director of musical films who established the geometric-modern play with bodies in large numbers as a widely popular form of entertainment; around the same time, the Nazis, too, whipped their crowds into visual shape. A very different inspiration were the pictures coming from El Salvador: the staged abasement of young men made to surrender their bodies to a brutal carceral regime by the tens of thousands made headlines around the world in 2022. The Israeli military recently applied the same image politics when it published pictures of Palestinian prisoners in their underwear.
Santiago Sierra’s new work unmasks the postcolonial Western rhetoric. It points to the continuity of the European pattern of really existing colonialism and racism. The Maelstrom eventually congeals into exactly the kind of menacing, apocalyptic Black mass that strikes such fear into the hearts of Europeans like Borrell and that anarchists like Sierra welcome as an uncontainable geopolitical biopower from below.
