Jo Ractliffe Tereno Ocupado at Warren Siebrits
by Michael Smith
If I have to wade through one more review of a photographic exhibition that refracts its reading through the theoretical lenses of Barthes, Berger, Foucault or Sontag, I think I'm going to check myself into Amy Winehouse's rehab, pre-emptively. Art critics around photographic shows are like octogenarians at shopping centres: they can't seem to take three steps without leaning heavily on a crutch of some sort. The Zimmer Frame of choice, a clutch of theories around representation, recurs with alarming regularity and constancy. Beyond the obvious critical inertia, this fug of quasi-thought seems to engender a reciprocal torpor in some photographic artists. These appear increasingly content to produce aesthetically barren work that 'plays' with dilute identity, gender or some other redundant retread of yesterday's key theories.
The strength of Jo Ractliffe's work on 'Terreno Ocupado', her latest body of work shown at Warren Siebrits in Johannesburg, is that it doesn't play: it gets to the point. Ractliffe, whose own reticence to be photographed is in stark contrast to the navel-gazing narcissism of many younger women photographers in our fair land, seems compelled to go beyond her parochial experience and seek out bigger situations and images, and the implications thereof. Arguably at its most powerful since Vlakplaas, 2 June 1999 - Drive By Shooting, Ractliffe's work on this show feels vital, in all senses of the word.
1975 marked the end of colonial rule in Angola, yet paradoxically the beginning of Africa's longest-running civil war, a litany of catastrophes and systematised barbarism that spanned the decades until 2002. During the war Luanda, the country's capital, once called the 'Paris of Africa', suffered years of setback and dilapidation, as if its ethically fraught history as slave trade centre and hub of colonial administrative power had finally caught up with it.
Over a period of a number of months between 2007 and 2008, Ractliffe travelled to Luanda to photograph landscapes, interiors, settlements and people. Initially, her focus roamed the vestiges of colonial presence, from deserted and derelict city buildings and dioramas at the Museo de Historia Natural to palatial, well-maintained mansion interiors. Yet it was with images of the settlements that skirt the city, Boa Vista and the Roque Santeiro market, that this project hit its stride.
For this show Ractliffe has turned once again to monochrome, after notable forays into colour for her documentation of Johannesburg's throbbing inner city. As such her oft-observed 'Mad Maxian' aesthetic of allowing the mucky past to bleed into the murky future (probably first noticeable in her Nadir series) resurfaces. This is particularly true of images like The beach at Ilha, which readily recalls the timbre of those mid-80s Vissershok landscapes. Unlike the images Ractliffe created in 'Johannesburg Inner City Works' and related projects, which are lent a very particular contemporaneity by their colour, the works on 'Terreno Ocupado' address a texture, a rhythm and a magnitude of events that transcend colour's temporal binds and retinal naturalism.
This is especially true in images like the triptych Smoking rubbish at the edge of Roque Santeiro market 1, 2 and 3: the hazy tonality and unstable composition seem to prefigure the market's looming relocation as gentrification threatens Luanda's poor settlements. In the right-hand panel of the triptych, the virtual obliteration of detail by the titular smoke reinforces such a reading. The work, along with the four-panel The cliffs at Boa Vista, feels simultaneously prehistoric and post-apocalyptic.
A similar quality, one Ractliffe identified to me as 'Mad Max meeting Canterbury Tales', pervades the single image Roque Santeiro market on a Sunday morning. In the image, piled up packaging crates and a forest of apparently functionless poles stretch skyward, while threads of plastic bunting, remnants of previous celebrations, flap in Luanda's merciless wind. Here the excision of colour is particularly necessary, allowing an insistence on the surfaces of wood, earth and litter to dominate.
Conceptually, this and many works on the show juxtapose activity and desolation: Ractliffe speaks of the project being about, for the most part, exploring the seemingly boundless human capacity for endeavour. Images like Flour seller, Roque Santeiro market and Roadside gasoline station at Panguila counter the obvious poverty of the subjects with an insistence on their tenacity. There are moments when the images recall Brazilian-born Sebãstio Salgado's riveting photographs of South American miners in open cast mines. Yet while Salgado's interest was clearly in exposing a phenomenon of exploitation, Ractliffe seems interested in charting humanity's resilience, even humour, in the face of near-apocalypse.
This is evident in the photographs of one of the Roque Santeiro video clubs, a tented stall where one can watch Hollywood blockbusters translated into Portuguese (the handsome tome published to accompany the exhibition, also titled Terreno Ocupado mentions that Senhor e Senhora Smith is one popular option). Ractliffe's decision to record this small fact over a series of three separate works on the show underlines her sense of its life-affirming significance.
More than that, it signals a development in Ractliffe's intent to depart from the Sturm und Drang of Nadir (which means 'lowest point' or 'depths of despair'). Nor is this the easy irony of Bob Geldof's Pink watching television in a comfy chair in the midst of a WW II battlefield in The Wall. Rather, Ractliffe seems keen to let the camera record more broadly than simply Africa's horror and desolation, a courtesy ironically not often extended to Africa by Hollywood.
This impulse also underpins Men's clothing, Roque Santeiro market and Schoolgirls' uniforms, Roque Santeiro market, two images in which pristine garments hang against the decidedly less pristine environs of the market. As much as the landscapes on the show track dissolution and loss of structure in the wake of the civil war, the closer details such as these seem to be tracing structure's reemergence, fleshing out Ractliffe's sense of her experience in Luanda.
This body of work is a powerful addition to an already-stellar career, one in which the nuances of African cities' changing characters are frequently the subject. Ractliffe remains at the forefront of photographic production in this country, as much for her complex understanding of humanity as for her ability to 'get the shot'. I for one can't wait to see what she does next.
Opens: September 23
Closes: October 24
Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary
140 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 327 0000
Email: enquiries@warrensiebrits.co.za
www.warrensiebrits.co.za
Hours: Tue - Fri 11am - 6pm, Sat 11am - 3pm
