“Typing…” is a quiet film on embodied gestures of refusal. The moving ethnographic portrait reveals signals of negation in the discomforting positions African sitters were often subjected to.

 

It sits in contrast to the word ‘typing…’, a pending caption with ellipsis alluding to the waiting of a message that never arrives, and the pseudoscientific attempt to dehumanise and catalog African people into rigid ‘types’.

 

Early photobooks functioned algorithmically, with a set of rules for surveillance and seriality in the colonial machine, muting the interior lives of the many depicted. What are the afterlives of these algorithms today, in the age of artificial intelligence and synthetic images?

 

Footnote: Mangbetu queen’s gaze in Belgian Congo 1940s travelogue film made by Paul L. Hoefler, who also co-authored the exploitation film and book “Africa Speaks!” (1930)