Review

Nosferasta

First published by Art Monthly, May 2022

Adam Khalil and Bailey Sweitzer with Oba, Spike Island, Saturday 5 February to Sunday 8 May 2022

In his 2006 novel Blindsight, former marine biologist Peter Watts suggested a fantastical solution to the predicament of deep space transit. A resilient astronautical body must be imagined, Watts reasoned, one that could withstand the protracted durations of interstellar frontierism. The answer could be found in the hypothetical discovery of an extinct sub-species of human being, a terrestrial ‘vampire’, whose immortality and glacial metabolism might be resurrected in the service of a new era of colonial ambition among the stars. That these ancestors were plagued by an unquenchable bloodlust provided a sinister undertone to their labours, forecasting human expansionism – whether global or interplanetary – as an always extractive and bloody affair.

As if sketching the macabre pre-history of Watts’s prognosis, Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s hypnagogic horror film Nosferasta, 2021, made in collaboration with the Trinidadian artist and activist Oba, deploys a similar interpretation of the vampire, albeit backwards through time, to an ur-site of the colonial imaginary. Opening on the twilit sands of a Caribbean beach in 1504, the film reconstructs a cryptic conversation between a European navigator and his servant as they cautiously contemplate the breaking of dawn. ‘Can you change yourself into an Indian? Or even better, an African?’ the navigator asks before painting his face with boot polish and hinting at the parasitic purpose of his inquiry in this brave new world: ‘We are aliens here, we can get away with anything … but we can’t get away with this. I’m not black, I’m just painted black. To be black, you have to be black.’ Fearful of the sun and its encroaching rays, the pair race towards the body of a young semi-conscious black man washed ashore amidst a tide of seaweed. A West African escapee from a slave ship that had been charting the Middle Passage, the man awakens to witness the navigator in his true predatory form, where, fangs revealed, he bites the fugitive announcing, ‘my name is Christopher Columbus, welcome to my world’.    

Thus begins both the origin story of Oba and this peculiar 32-minute film that brings historical dramatisations into restless proximity with documentary footage, as the filmmakers trail the artist around a pandemic-plagued New York City. Here we see him seek legal advice on the renewal of his Green Card, collaborate with a support worker to pass the written component of his citizenship test, and demonstrate his own techniques of invisibility beyond those foisted upon him by the impediments of state regulation. Most importantly, we hear him tell the tale of his own vampirism.

In Oba’s personal mythology the colonial compulsion is understood as a blood-borne pathogen transmitted between oppressor and oppressed. These bloodlines are not metaphorical, however, but form the imaginal lifeblood of a secret history of social engineering, covert operations and uncomfortable complicities with the colonial project. They position the monstrous as a technology of selfhood through which the internalisation and reproduction of colonial power might be confronted and ultimately exorcised.

Columbus reappears as a menacing yet influential revenant throughout Nosferasta, indoctrinating Oba as an immortal servant of European interests, imploring him to act as an invisible agent, a ‘guiding hand on the lower back of history’. We learn, through a timeline told to Khalil and Sweitzer and republished here to accompany the film, of Oba’s trans-historical misdemeanours, his sabotaging of slave revolts, betrayal of indigenous movements, and development of the submarine telegraph cables that would usher in a new age of technologized imperial ascendency.

It isn’t until 1992, when Oba was first offered the ‘vampiric antidote’ of marijuana, that he reconnected with the causes of black anti-imperial struggle, pan-Africanism and the thought of Marcus Garvey and Haile Selassie, leading him eventually to Rastafarianism and a newfound lucidity on colonial power. ‘Columbus bit them as slaves and had them build this whole city for him,’ he laments, gazing over a glittering downtown skyline at dusk, ‘Presidents past and presidents to come, he signed up with them, there’s a new world order now, but it’s the same vampires.’ The film demonstrates the persistence of this lineage as it circles crowds contesting a monument at New York’s Columbus Circle, erected in 1892 to celebrate 400 years since the explorer’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas.   

Like their previous film, 2018’s Empty Metal, which questioned the impotence of art in an age of state-sanctioned terror, the murder by police of innocent black men, and the brutal governmental suppression of indigenous land rights movements, Nosferasta betrays an almost naive interest in insurgent activist models and alternate spiritualities. However, where Empty Metal found a charming solace in the tub-thumping idealism of well-worn insurrectionary doctrines such as ‘coming insurrections’, ‘temporary autonomous zones’ or comically cosy Unabomber separatism, Nosferasta, with its expanded repertoire of published texts, veers at least twice towards frankly uncomfortable conspiracy: Oba’s implication that millionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was the groomed protege of Sigmund Freud smacked so familiarly of bullshit anti-Semitic Q-Anon non-thinking that I’m more than a little surprised the filmmakers allowed the accusation to stand un-interrogated. If, as Jack Halberstam has suggested, our monsters are capable of gestating the negative meanings against which oppressively limited ideas of the human might be produced, shouldn’t Oba, as a vampire himself, be more responsible with the monsters he himself is willing to birth?

In a recent essay for e-flux titled ‘It’s After the End of the World: A Zombie Heaven?’, Simon Sheikh brilliantly identifies a useful distinction between the ‘folkloric’ and the ‘techno-scientifically’ post-human as they occur in the figures of the vampire, the ghost and the zombie, asking what kinds of troubled afterlife these figures might help us to imagine in the wake of significant historical junctures. Oba’s ‘afterlife’, it would seem, is a weird hybrid of both; somewhere between the legacy-focused vampire of the high gothic and the future-oriented vampire of Watts’s science fiction. Unfortunate conspiracies aside, the ‘living death’ of Oba’s unwilling colonial complicity portrayed by Khalil and Sweitzer is a tragic and otherwise vital parable, suffused with its own distinct sentiments of guilt and responsibility that are perhaps the unique preserve of a subject destined to wander an earth still awaiting any truly ‘post’ colonial age.