Introduction

This lecture explores the operations of scale within cinematic and photographic mediations of the South African War (1899–1902), a peripheral colonial conflict between the British Empire and the Boer republics in South Africa. Examining actuality films from the war alongside officers’ accounts, photographs, maps, and neglected archival collections, it proposes a way to think about scale within what Malcomess calls an emerging colonial order of information. The latter, she proposes, restructures the modern imaginary of space and time around the concept of the field, a schema with intentionally multiple inflections: a battlefield, a diagrammatic form, a field of attention, and a spatio-temporal field inscribed within diverse forms from cinematography to cartography, telegraphy, aerial photography, photogrammetry, and stereography. Employing a media-archaeological approach, Malcomess tracks operations of scale across various technologies of inscription and transmission in what Friedrich Kittler calls a turn-of-the-century discourse network to reveal a colonial desire to collapse and control distance. These case studies thus make visible a structure of feeling (Raymond Williams) that invests colonial white masculinities with a right to mobility across vast distances, contingent on their assumed possession of technological knowledge. Black colonized subjects are however either absent in these archives, or a spectral presence. Malcomess thus resituates familiar arguments around cinema’s transformation of modern perception in relation to a specifically colonial constellation of information technology and media.

Bettina Malcomess is a writer and artist based in Johannesburg, where they teach interdisciplinary studio practice at Wits School of Arts. Occasionally working under the name Anne Historical, their artistic practice inhabits multivocality and density, embodied research and material investigation. Malcomess’s writing and research looks for new archival vocabularies, ways to rethink the densities of historical material in a present marked by urgent ecological and political questions. Since 2016, Malcomess has produced work with analogue film, light, and sound that inhabits the entanglement of memory, technology, and history: a series of unfinished articulations in counterpoint voices, an attempt to queer the signal. Malcomess holds a PhD in film studies from Kings College London. Recent exhibitions include Sentimental Agents at Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin (2022), and Wits Art Museum (2024), an installation of digital and analogue films engaging the archives and memorials of the South African War. They are co-author of Mapping the Sensible: Distribution, Inscription, Cinematic Thinking (De Gruyter, 2023), and co-editor of Not No Place: Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times (Jacana, 2013). Malcomess runs a platform for experimentation called joining room that in 2021 produced the collaborative vinyl and publication Proximal Distal: Sonic Passages, working with artists from Maputo, Joburg, Berlin, and Basel.
https://nagel-draxler.de/artist/bettina-malcomess/