The Colony

“The Colony”, by its title, immediately points to a tension between the oppressor and the oppressed. The artist Dinh Q. Lê, using drones as aerial cameras, films the Chincha Islands in three parts; the claim to fame of the islands lie in that it was the subject of a war waged by Spain as a colonialist power in 1864, for the sake of its guano deposits. The video footage shows the present-day harvesting of the islands’ guano.

The videos are played like three segments of a mini-movie, with each segment flickering on a large screen against a wall. Persistent sound emanates from each video, a blaring dissonance that intrudes into the ears. The medium causes an assault of the senses – the flashing, moving images and cacophonous sound cannot be turned off. The viewer is immersed in an experience that he or she cannot control.

Each video begins with the camera panning over an idyllic expanse of blue sea, before moving inland. We see a huge mass of yellow rock, looming towards us – then the drone camera swoops up and over, and the scene fills up with numerous sea birds flitting and flying, in haphazard, wild and abrupt movements. The camera seems to join them in dance, moving in, zooming out and moving in again, whirling and twirling. We hang on to the views, seeing where it will take us. From up high, we observe the birds rest on the ground like stubborn specks, and the land starts to look mottled and disease-like. The birds are the producers of the excrement that eventually become precious guano. We realise the unmoving specks are birds engaging in the activity that ascribes the island its sole value – shitting. We are wholly at the mercy of the drone camera’s eyes, which linger on the birds, and we are transfixed, complicit in the scatological compulsion. The sense of control over us (the viewer) is acute.

We become aware that the preliminary images of blue water and clear skies are not as idyllic as they may appear. This agitation is mirrored by the up-and-down, fly-like, buzzing movement of the drones, which fly and hover around the islands. There is a boundary-less aspect to the air that these drones occupy, as they seem to fly so easily, unimpeded into spaces. In the footage, the camera follows behind another drone, hovering and stopping outside a neglected building, before weaving past an empty doorframe – symbolically transgressing a security threshold. Together with the drones’ functioning a pair of seeing eyes (constant surveillance), this ascribes to the drones an omnipresence that is suffocating, almost claustrophobic. The mechanical hum of the drones, reinforce the sense of an alien intrusion, alluding to the horror of colonialism. There is a sinister impression that the islands are not yet free from the threat that was posed by Spain in the past.

Indeed, a kind of present-day enslavement is depicted in the third video, which shows labourers digging, packing and transporting the guano deposits. The entire operation is primitive and savage, and dehumanizes the workers by prizing the guano resource above all else. The camera zooms in on the faces of the labourers, who grin at us while they work in the appalling conditions – they are helpless to escape their fate, and we are helpless to rescue them.

Dinh Q. Lê presents the gouged landscape of the islands as a grotesque testimony to man’s exploitative greed, and a repugnant criticism of oppressive power. There is a time-bending quality to this criticism, arising from the juxtaposition of futuristic drone technology against an unforgiving, primitive landscape. The drones exist as an anachronistic warning of the future, a pervasive threat of oppressive power we must all defend against.

The last scene of the video shows a man, reaching up in the sky to reach for a drone. The drone hovers just out of reach of the man whose arms are outstretched, before touching base into his hands. This perhaps depicts the (tragic or hopeful) inevitability of man as masterminds of their own fates.