As a core-curator of Season 2, Jamal Nxedlana chose to develop a new, experimental version of Fully Automated Luxury Influencer, an immersive film experience created by CUSS Group. The film was made up of three chapters, and for the screening, was presented as an installation and interspersed by live performances from Waldo Luc Alexander and Penwell Langa.
CUSS aims to include arts practitioners functioning outside of the group through the sub-commissioning of work. Due to this, the network is amorphous and can change on a project to project basis. The network is a way for the group to overcome certain socio-economic issues that have affected the way scenes in South Africa have been fractured by class and privilege.
From the Cuss Group website: “Our conceptual focus is on the rise of ‘influencer culture’, a contemporary corporate strategy in which a brand symbiotically attaches itself to an existent consumer group. Marketing discourse presents this as a mutually beneficial relationship but we can’t help but see the darker, and parasitic ramifications of such attachment. Influencer culture emerges from rapid evolutions in media, commodity, and technology. Politically, individual influencers and small groups can increasingly mobilise extremist sentiments to leverage themselves into power, as more saliently evidenced in the rise of Donald Trump. And such influence is mediated through often obscure assemblages of secret algorithms, government psychological operations, corporate lobbying, and emotional engineering. The vague, but functionally endless concept of the influencer, seems a strategy of power perfectly aligned for an era of augmented reality, mediated through social media and the internet.
Our aim is not to produce a literal, sociological treatise, but rather to explore the many facets of contemporary influence through metaphor. We want to use the genre tropes of science fiction and horror to map the surreal and baroque dimensions of influence. Our focus will be on the parasitic aspects of it, of a cognitive virus infecting, distorting and reassembling reality in perverse new ways. This approach is influenced by the tradition of politically engaged pulp films, from They Live to Get Out, in which monstrosity serves as grotesque commentary on an obscene reality. The setting will be Johannesburg, a postcolonial metropolis which embodies the extremes of late capitalism. Squalid slums are towered over by gleaming corporate headquarters, looming over the landscape like spaceships. Toxic mine dumps surround paranoid suburbs, their quiet streets fortified by military grade technology. But the city is also a centre for culture, the home of the latest mutations in sound and style. With the help of the production network we already have in the city, we will tap into this aesthetic to produce a story of influence run.”
INSTALLATION & LIVE PERFORMERS
MUSICIANS | Waldo Luc Alexander, Dan Selsick, & Zamani Xolo
VOCALIST | Penwell Langa
FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY INFLUENCER FILM
ARTISTS | Jamal Nxedlan, Ravi Govender, Christopher McMichael, Zamani Xolo, Lex Trickett, Mandisi Msingaphantsi, Hakim Malema & FAKA
ACTORS | Lisle Collins, Zenzelisphesihle Sparky Xulu, Langa Mavuso, Jordan Major, Gerard Bester, Patricia Boyer, Hayleigh Evans, Ayanda Nhlapo, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Sir-Cornwell Ray Zulu, Desire Marea, Thulani Zwane & Sparks Napoli
PRODUCER | Allison Swank
ADVISORY CINEMATOGRAPHER | Kutlwano Makgalemele