ARTWORK AND TEXT BY NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS
How does the trajectory of a stone being thrown register (or not) within the trajectories of celestial bodies? How does the temporal trajectory of settler colonialism register (or not) within the temporal trajectory of the cosmos? Nolan Oswald Dennis shares a short note and digital sketch from a new body of work that asks such questions, in particular with regard to the Black South African struggle for the recovery of Indigenous land.
A rock flies through the air in accordance with certain laws, some fundamental, others incidental. For example the path of any moving body is determined by Newton’s First Law of Motion. A model. However its size, velocity, environment, and intention, that moving body demands the application of multiple, interacting laws to produce an appropriate path resolution. A system. While a model abstracts to an ideal condition, a system abstracts to a functional resolution. What I mean is that a system ignores interactions which are deemed superfluous to its operation. Externalities, social costs, trivial forces, noise. These so-called superfluous interactions are usually the source of catastrophic accumulation. The contradictions pile up.
A newly inaugurated regime in the United States has embarked on a campaign of light sanctions and heavy rhetoric to reverse the modest South African land reform and social transformation program. This campaign is justified as a response to claims of an anti-white genocide promoted by an Afrikaaner nationalist movement. The promotion of the narrative of anti-white genocide itself rests on claim by Afrikaaner nationalists that they are, despite being descendants of European settler-colonists, indigenous people in South Africa and, on that basis, demand ethno-sovereign status—a segregated white state. Basically a return of formal Apartheid on the basis of settler indigeneity.