Cui Bono

‘Cui Bono’ is a video installation examining how digital technologies shapes economic narratives decoding biases, contradictions, and taboos embedded within dominant eco-political global models. Entirely built from found footage of the World Economic Forum (WEF) conferences — a space where financial and technological elites dictate developmental visions of sustainability and innovation — this work conducts a virtual ethnography of knowledge extraction and exploitation, exposing the bodily and rhetorical mechanisms that sustain soft power and doublespeak in unstable times.

Drawing from previous research (eg., Hic et Nunc; Inter[...]Views), this project investigates themes of transnational governance, and media censorship. By dissecting hundreds of lectures, the aim is to challenge Global North’s dominant discourses and projected solutionists’ outcomes concerning Global South’s economic agency. Presenting solid financial truths, these forums reveal a choreography of staged power, where concrete meaning dissolves into rhetorical patterns of emptiness, hiding oppressive strategies.

Through an extreme editing methodology, ‘Cui Bono’ displays a critical inventory of gestural hesitations and phatic expressions unmasking the vulnerability behind normative speeches. This audiovisual layering blurs hierarchies of speakers, while altering rhythms and tones contemplating moments of uncertainty. The result is an eerie, fragmented archive that resists the post-truth era’s claims to authority, engaging viewers to actively reconsider how Africa’s economic realities are imagined and recomposed outside its own frontiers. The work interrogates the ambivalent politics of (re)presentation, highlighting whose voices influence economic futures and whose are erased in algorithmic and media-driven ‘epistemic violence’.

This work has been shown first at the Festival Cité/Histoire at the University of Geneva in march 2026.