Fanny Zaman
(b. 1972, Antwerp)
D plus one is a portrait of a newly installed electronic trade system set in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX), for coffee, sesame and beans is in its initial stage. At the time of shoot ECX is only 4 years old. It is a central system set-up according to international standards (i.e. linear, rational, logical, clean and technical). The camera settles itself amongst the traders (the set) slowly observing people, interior, comments and gestures until details reveal alternative layers, noise and complexity. D plus one portrays the economics within this particular set and produces an ambivalent image.
"From Surface (FID 2008 competition) to Song-MountainArea (FID 2010), Fanny Zaman has largely proved her curiosity which is always devoted to invisible and ungraspable processes. This time we are at the Agricultural Exchange in Addis Ababa. It is a new adventure for Ethiopia, and more widely for a part of Black Africa, equipped with a system of electronic commerce aimed at the exchange mostly of coffee and corn, and she tracks secrets there. Fanny Zaman slowly unwinds from a geography of bodies and terri- tories to screen languages while preserving, with her usual sense of mystery, the complexity of relationships generated by this grafting of modernity." (FID 2012 catalogue)
