Bio: Anthony Easton is a poet, critic, and photographer from Edmonton, Alberta. His poetry has been published in Kiss Machine, Jones St, Fat?So! and others. His criticism has been published in Xtra, Xtra West, Flack, and Stylus and has appeared in end of the year polls for both the Nashville Scene and the Village Voice. A paper of his will appear in an upcoming academic monograph on the Magnetic Fields. His photography has appeared in group shows in Toronto, and New York. He has had a solo show of Polaroids in Fort Saskatchewan. His interests include post queer theory, rural issues, the intersection of language and politics, the implications of non-art disciplines into high art, and critical forgetfulness.

Synergy:
It comes from Jung, doesn’t it? I always liked Freud more then Jung. I liked the dark muck of sex and death, Jung seemed to neat, healthy, happy. But Africa has had enough of that dark muck, especially from us westerners, its all over people like Haggard and Conrad. But the opposite is true as well, small wallet size studio portraits from Mali become giant, glossy silver nitrate photos, important ritual objects from Nigeria become trophies for European museums, and slave ports in Ghana become tourist traps. We note Palestine but ignore Dafur.

This tug and pull, of colonial and colonised, of who gets noticed and who gets ignored, of how we use ritual, art and purpose, of the theoretical matrix of negritude and the critics of that framework, all corresponds to the definition of synergy given to me: "the simultaneous action of correlated energies which together have a greater total effect than the sum of their individual effects."

The best example of this are the technocrats of corporations, some aid organizations and certain NGOs, who try to convince that anyone owning the world was a moral good, a deep necessity. It is used it as a word to describe how the parts intersect, like a robot, like how an octopus kills its prey.

Synergy is in 1905 splitting up Africa, regardless of historical patterns, from a Berlin Conference room. Synergy is how the Americans and the Russians fought ideological battles through ought the continent, battles that were less about the good of Africa, and more about abstract ideologies. Synergy is the SI folks in 1968 getting clues from the film Battle for Algiers, and the same movie dictating strategy for the Pentagon in 2006. It's a German theologian telling a billion Catholics that the south will have to re-evangelize the north, and it's having nothing on the television but starving infants and corrupt warlords, and nothing in the movies but savages and jungle drums, in this age of global media.

It is refusing the real geography of a place so large and diverse, that it is patronizing and exhausting to talk about it as one place.

But all of this is general. I kept thinking about were Edmonton fits in with all of this. It dawned on me, what we have in common with Africa is oil.

As a photographer, I am often concerned with beauty, with making things pretty, and then having the larger politics be hidden within. The picture I chose to share with Hands across Africa could be considered literally synergistic, but it is also symbolically so.

Like ancient monoliths, in a slick modernist white, these containers hold thousands of liters of petroleum products. They are a part of a large web that transports the liquid worldwide. They are then one part in a larger machine. How they work in that machine is synergy—how they hold oil that will go north or south or east or west.

But money flows faster then oil. The money that these machines make, will go back to Europe, like the money from Prince Rupert’s Land went back to England. It will join money from the Middle East, from South America, and Africa.

I consider this small, 5x7 photo, in a discount frame a way to remember the ebb and flow of global capital. To put a crude point on it all, this photo in its beauty and its silence, reminds that the Royal Dutch Shell that refines and pumps gas in this plant near Sherwood Park is the same Royal Dutch Shell that killed Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Another Note:
I alluded to this print being 5x7 earlier. I wanted to remind the viewer of prints taken by Malian photog Seydou Keita. Keita's work has been stolen, imported, imperialised, and broken of a very intimate context, part of that theft was formal. The orginals are small, intended for household use, and remind us of how snap shots build communities. Made much larger and much more glossy, they become exotics artifacts, for rich collectors, who reuse to believe in a modernist Africa. This has happened to a number of photographers, from Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Mali and other countries. Keita is the most famous, and the best documented.