Choose Your Own Father

Choose Your Own Father derives from extensive archival research into John Latham’s early history in Zambia, fictionalizing personal histories of Latham’s father and interweaving these with those of my own father. John Latham (1921 - 2006) was a Northern-Rhodesian born British conceptual artist. His father, Geoffrey Latham, was a colonial administrator who was instrumental in implementing the Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment. Under this program silent educational films were produced and screened to ‘native’ people via mobile cinemas in the British territories in East and Central Africa. It signaled the British Empire embracing soft power and indirect rule in late colonial period. My own father, Muhammad Jan Leghari, comes from a Baloch tribe that was nomadic till a generation ago. His own military career has continued with this itinerant way of being.

The work considers the nature of taking influence from another and the problem of attributing origins. Ultimately, I use the figure of the father as a metaphor to speak about paternalistic order, the fantasy of “The West”, myths of origin and whether one can ever be free to choose one’s own fathers. The film is anchored by a consistent voiceover but is edited afresh through code each time it is played. It has about 6.7 quintillion number of permutations amounting to a total time longer than the age of the universe, and is thus, impossible to watch in all its combinations. In this sense, the film is poised between control and fatalism, akin to how one might imagine one’s influences. 

Produced as an outcome of the Delta (Δ) Research Placement for Flat Time House.