The Gamblers: The Zama Zama Miners of Southern Africa

The Gamblers is an immersive work that aims to take audience members on a Dante-esque journey across the threshold of borders — political as well as geopolitical — into a world beneath the surface of the earth and across the landscape of postindustrial labor in the ruins of South Africa’s gold mines. Made on location and in collaboration with South African cinematographer Ebrahim Hajee and southern African migrant miners Bhekani Mumpande, Prosper Ncube, and Darren Munenge, The Gamblers is part of a series of related works, which include the feature-length documentary We are Zama Zama, produced and directed by Rosalind Morris.

Rosalind Morris is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University and Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. Her work addresses questions of the relationships between value and violence; aesthetics and the political; the sexualisation of power and desire; and the history of anthropological thought and social theory. Her books include The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses’s The Worship of Fetish Gods and its Legacies (with Daniel Leonard, 2017); Accounts and Drawings from Underground: East Rand Proprietary Mines Cash Book, 1906 (with William Kentridge, 2014); That Which is Not Drawn: William Kentridge in Conversation with Rosalind Morris (2013). She is a current fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Philippe Leonard lives and works in Montreal. His artistic practice focuses on still and moving images, through film, photography, performance, and installations. His theoretical and aesthetic reflections focus on the complex temporality of still and moving images, the spectral dimension of physical spaces, and expanded documentary practices. He completed a Bachelor’s degree in Film Production at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and a Master of Fine Arts at Concordia University. In 2013, he was awarded a residency at the MIT Media Lab to study under the mentorship of Harun Farocki.

This multi-screen work and live edit of high resolution video and 16 mm film will be followed by a conversation between the work’s director Rosalind Morris, Philippe Leonard, its video editor and 16 mm film artist, Yolanda Ariadne Collins, Fellow 2018-20 at ICI Berlin, and Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Professor of Media Studies and Gender Studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

An event of the American Academy in Berlin in cooperation with the ICI Berlin

Generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation