Excuse me, while I disappear

“Excuse me, while I disappear is quite an abstract and lyrical representation of a very real and contested context (Kilamba Kiaxi city) set within quite a complicated and dynamic country (Angola).  

Angola is a fascinating country, with a genuinely unique modern history. As a South African, it was a country I was nearly sent to, to fight in a protracted war, called the Border War in South Africa, for the apartheid government, in partnership with the CIA, sent troops to assist the UNITA rebel army in overthrowing the Marxist MPLA in Angola. The MPLA had significant support from both USSR and Cuba during this conflict. The recent discovery of offshore substantial crude oil deposits and the growing upstream capacity (2nd largest in Africa) has catapulted this isolated country onto the world stage, with massive investments from the P.R.C. whilst making Luanda one of the most expensive cities in the world. 

I have produced a photographic monograph on the city and wanted to focus more closely on a singular project or context with my second monograph. The film Excuse me, while I disappear grew out of the time I spent documenting the city for this photographic monograph. 

Kilamba Kiaxi is a new city for 500 000 people outside Luanda, Angola — built by the Chinese construction company CITIC and financed by the Hong Kong-based China International Fund. Angola is a difficult country to film and I have been working there since 2009. I researched the city extensively before I shot the film — using Google Earth mostly to get a good sense of the design as well as social media to gauge the resident population's feeling and thoughts on this new city. 

The city is one of the strangest places I worked in — it is a product of a kind of lunacy, designed by a Chinese contractor based on a Broadacre City approach to the car as the sole means of public transportation and imported into a context like Luanda, where it stands solely as housing. There is no culture, no cinemas, no museums, no theatres. and even shops are severely limited. There are no businesses, it is solely for housing. The city looks like a film set, like those towns in Spaghetti Westerns where only the façade of the building is made, with nothing behind it. So I simply wanted to document this gigantic film set on its terms, using the inherent production value of the place as I found it.

I worked in Kilamba Kiaxi for 3 weeks to make Excuse me, while I disappear — simply walking around the streets, both with and without the actor shooting the film. I talked with lots of people, police officers, Chinese construction workers, the actor — it was a very memorable and insightful process, which I am now developing into a photographic monograph publication. 

I think the process of producing, filming, writing and editing a film on my own is a complicated model to work in, but one that is well suited to the kind of film I made. It allows me to find the film in a very organic, research-based manner and not to have too many predetermined ideas, plans or intentions — to genuinely respond to the location and the actor. In this sense, the film kind of becomes a documentary of what happened on that given day, based on a series of parameters that are both intentional and simply inherent to the circumstances. The social and political context is the basis of my work.

My film is as much a political statement as it is a philosophical one. The social and political context it was made in and references and talks to is concerned with failed utopias; the very 'real' lives of those subjected to the strange callousness of most architectural and urban designs, as well as how we are seemingly doomed to be forever haunted by Modernism.

Conceptually, it is concerned with the visual mechanics of the mid-century European ethnographic cinema, African science fiction, the ‘Metropolitan Picturesque’ and Chinese visual perspective. However, as this film is totally made by me in every aspect of its production, it is a very clear and sincere expression of my own idiosyncratic and personal poetics — it is a direct expression. I’m not sure if it raises any particular questions. I hope that it functions as a gesture, on the understanding that my gesture happens to be a philosophical one.” 

Michael MacGarry in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (July 2015)