Core Dump: A Digital Wasteland
“A child who eats just one chicken egg from Agbogbloshie, a waste site in Ghana, will absorb 220 times the European Food Safety Authority daily limit for intake of chlorinated dioxins,” said Marie-Noel Brune Drisse, the lead WHO author on the report. “Improper e-waste management is the cause. This is a rising issue that many countries do not recognize yet as a health problem. If they do not act now, its impacts will have a devastating health effect on children and lay a heavy burden on the health sector in the years to come.”
The problem of electronic trash disposal in Africa is complicated and has roots in colonialism's legacy as well as Western mechanization's continued propagation of false notions of progress. For many years, colonial powers treated their subjects more like suppliers of cheap labor and raw materials than as participants on an equal footing in the world market.
Around 85% of the electronics and electrical components originate from the EU, and a large portion is thrown as e-waste once it reaches Ghana. In Europe, just 35% of used and trash electronics are recycled or collected by the government. The remaining materials are either thrown out, recycled improperly, or shipped to nations like Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria. In 2009, Ghana received roughly 215,000 tonnes of e-waste annually, or nine pounds for each citizen.
Currently based in Cape Town, Francois Knoetze is a performance artist, filmmaker, and sculptor. In his work, Knoetze investigates the history of material and social intersections as well as the life cycles of abandoned things. The protagonists of Knoetze’s film are mythical ’trash creatures’ made entirely out of waste and disposed technology. Knoetze draws inspiration from the idea of mongo, a colloquial name for a thing that has been thrown and creatively reclaimed.
His surrealist work finds treasure in everyday trash. In this initiative, Knoetze's study and practice aim to examine how knowledge monopolies have misrepresented ideas of progress and mechanization as Western inventions while ignoring Africa's historical and contemporary contributions to the current supply chain.
Knoetze saw these electronic scraps (trash) as artifacts that spoke to the Trans-Atlantic power dynamics of the nineteenth century. Core Dump explores how the co-dependent relationship between industrialization and slavery created permanent divisions between nature and civilization, as well as between race and technology.
The concept of Core Dump prompts us to reflect on whether it is possible to design and cultivate digital technologies and practices without relying on hegemonic and neocolonialist frameworks. “Can digital technologies and practices be created and developed without relying on hegemonic and neocolonialist models?”