Archive: Issue No. 70, June 2003

To the north of Table Mountain lies a large span of wind-blown, sand-covered land known as the Cape Flats. The system of Apartheid forced thousands of households of "non-white" people to move to this, the most inhospitable of Cape Town's many living areas. Today it is home to over a million people, who make a life there. Chris Ledochowski, one of only a few South African artists invited to exhibit on the 2003 Venice Biennale, has made this landscape and the people who live in it the subject of his photographic work.

With a record of engagement in this world going back over two decades, Ledochowski gives dignity to artistic practices of the people of the Cape Flats through sensitive photographs that demonstrate the rich culture and varied artistic responses of residents to the world and life around them.

"Chris Ledochowski has attempted for the past two years to give integrity to this tradition [of hand-tinted portraits]. Instead of placing dark colours on the black and white photos, he has used transparent paints so that the details in the prints may be highlighted."
Christelle Terreblanche, translated from her article 'Die vele gesigte van die kaapse vlakte' in Vrye Weekblad, January 31, 1991.

The series of work that will show, with some differences, at both Michael Stevenson Contemporary in Cape Town and 'The Structure of Survival' in Venice from mid-June shows the Cape Flats not as a dry and dusty site of desolation but rather as a place where ordinary people use art and colour to enrich their environment. This self-made culture, born out of a resistance to state control and Apartheid is presented as a viable image of hope within a world of hardship; a reflection of rising to the challenges of a globalised world.

"A collective desire for change gave people purpose and direction. I found that even in the midst of this modern political struggle, people still drew primarily on their traditional cultures and religious convictions, using them as outlets for creative expression. This project attempts to capture expressions of that process."

Another, similar, set of images, focussing mainly on squatter communities, will be shown on 'The Structure of Survival', curated by Carlos Basualdo, at the 50th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. In the words of the curator: the exhibition "explores a constellation of themes related to the effects of political, economic and social crises in the developing world. The show does not attempt to fully document this situation, but to explore the ways in which artists and architects have reacted and react to these sets of conditions. Notions of sustainability, self-organisation and the articulation of various forms of aesthetic agency as forms of resistance are recurrent in the show. It is the powerful image of one of the most shocking and imposing evidences of these conditions in the city, the overwhelming presence of the shantytowns. 'The Structure of Survival' traces their presence in the cultural imagination of the developing world, and introduce the shanty as the object of a number of recent anthropological, urban and socio-economic studies."

Sensitive pastoral images, beautifully composed and framed, sought not to hide the history of struggle and trauma that were embedded in them. The hard-working farmer had seen the death of his wife to leprosy, drought and economic difficulties. Black and white prints such as Petros Mulaudzi with his Cattle in the Kraal and Church Service Adjacent to Petros' Home used subtle compositional structure to suggest classic images of the pastoral and picturesque while forcing a reading located in the South African landscape of the time. Writing for Die Burger, Gavin du Plessis noted at the time that no lover of documentary photography could miss the exhibition.

"Next I go back to Pondoland to complete my colour essay on the dope industry, documenting the role that's played by the two crops - mielies and dope - in the lives of these communities."