A two-part 35mm slide-tape text, produced while the Black Audio Film Collective were undergraduates. The work toured England from November 1984 to March 1985, using a Kodak dissolve unit to sequence images into narrative. The soundtrack to Signs of Empire, which consisted of tape loops of musique concrète and political speeches, was amplified to create a powerful environment of dread.

“There was a need for a recycling aesthetic. One thing we wanted to do was to comment on the past, because there was just no way forward without that. Tape-slide provided one of the easiest means for doing that because the reproducibility of images from slides, once you had a printer, meant you could reshoot, you could reframe, you could perform something with images. We also spent time trying to pull together a sonic backdrop which one could only call ‘black industrial’, because post-punk was in full swing by then.” (John Akomfrah)

single channel 35mm colour Ektachrome transferred to video
Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery