Stranded in Canton

The Swedish artist Måns Månsson has placed a fictional character in a real environment to explore the fascinating new relationship that has arisen between Africa and China, where democracy is one commodity among many others. No dialogue was written in advance, and the minimal story about the worthless t-shirts is just a pretext to conduct a cinematic experiment set in the Chinese city, where tens of thousands of African migrants are in the process of establishing themselves and creating a new life, in a historical parallel to the exchange that has always taken place between East and West. But this time, the West is not invited to the party. However, the reference to the lost souls in the American photographer William Eggleston's film of the same name suggests a tragicomic and existential absurdity independent of time and place.