Jo Ractliffe on Terreno Ocupado at Warren Siebrits
by Michael Smith
Jo Ractliffe's startling new body of work 'Terreno Ocupado' is currently on show at Warren Siebrits in Parkwood, Johannesburg. The show images Ractliffe's three journeys to Angola in 2007 and investigates what the artist calls the seemingly infinite human 'capacity for endeavour' in the wake of the country's 25 year civil postcolonial war.
I spoke to Ractliffe about this show and its interstices with previous bodies of her work.
Michael Smith: In the opening essay of the book accompanying this exhibition (Terreno Ocupado: Jo Ractliffe, published by Warren Siebrits 2008, ISBN 978-0-620-42206-2), you list the horrific postwar statistics: 1.5 million people dead, an amputee population of 70 000, 200 000 who have fled the country and another 62 000 internally displaced. Yet this body of work resists the impulse to image these atrocities, and looks instead at human tenacity.
Jo Ractliffe: I think this is partly because of the way Angola has figured for me. It's been largely an imaginary place; during high school, I had a boyfriend who - like other young white South African men then - was sent to 'The Border'. It was like that - a secret, abstracted place, full of myth and romance even, tales about Russians and Cubans and the Cold War. In the 80s when I was working on the Nadir series I read Ryszard Kapuscinski's book, Another Day of Life, which chronicled the last six months of colonial rule in Angola and the transition to independence.
It was an extraordinary book and the image of Angola it created has remained with me ever since - the dogs in Nadir were largely inspired by a passage in that book. So when the opportunity came for me to photograph in Angola last year, my first impulse was to find that landscape, my imaginary Angola. I was less interested in doing a social documentary project, or a forensic study. I was looking for something more oblique, something emblematic of that other world. And of course, what I found was very different...
MS: How did you initially approach the process?
JR: As much as I had a desire (for all that myth), I didn't have a specific idea about what to photograph: I didn't know what I would find there and my general tendency is to work 'in response' to an environment or situation rather than predetermining things. I re-read Kapuscinski's book and made a list of places - there was his room, no 47 in the Tivoli Hotel (it's still there!), the old Portuguese cemetery - places like that, vestiges of empire and war. I had a notion to go in search of Kapuscinski's 'lost dogs', metaphorically of course!
But I knew I wanted to 'shoot straight' and in black and white. For years I had been experimenting with ways to dislodge or resist the fixity - or the 'particularity', as David Goldblatt would call it - of the photograph, which resulted in works like Re: Shooting Diana, Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting), and also the series, Johannesburg Inner City Works. But my mode in those works (plastic cameras, dissembled subject matter, furtive looking etc.) was beginning to feel like it was turning in on itself: it had run its course with me.
I wanted to get back to a more direct engagement with a 'subject'; and also, the craft of making things: working in the darkroom and the particular process that goes with making silver handprints. For me, there is a kind of 'look' that's become quite prevalent in contemporary photography generally, especially with digital - what's considered 'exhibition scale', an attitude to colour, paper surface, etc. - which I wanted to move away from.
MS: It is becoming its own kind of orthodoxy: a mode of imaging the continent that superficially challenges perceived 'darkness' with bright colours and strong lighting.
JR: Yes, and even the opposite, a kind of 'muting', desaturating colour selectively. I wanted something different. I went back to black and white largely for this reason, but also because I wanted to work with light and objects and space in a particular way. Also, Luanda is surprisingly monochromatic; everything is covered in dust or mud and there is a permanent haze in the air. The murkiness of some of the images is very consistent with my visual experience of the city, so black and white made sense.
MS: While the large majority of the works on 'Terreno Ocupado' are silver gelatin prints, hand-printed, there are some that are pigment prints. Why the separation?
JR: This is primarily for practical reasons; the pigment prints are from photographs taken with my Diana camera which has no exposure settings, so short of using different speeds of film, there's no way to control exposure. And so the negatives are really tricky when it comes to printing. It's possible (all of reShooting Diana was printed in the darkroom) but still very limiting, especially when compared with what I can achieve digitally. So the tonal manipulation that would usually happen in the darkroom happens on Photoshop instead. But to be honest, Diana was there really as my 'Linus blanket'; I knew I wasn't going to cut it if I worked that way so my primary cameras were my Mamiyas ñ a 6" x 6" twin lens reflex and a 6" x 7" rangefinder.
MS: Looking around at the show, I'm reminded of William Kentridge's assertion made in the 80s that South African art had suffered for too long under the 'plague of the picturesque'. There is a tension in your works, between the way you've composed them in groups of three or four, like panoramic scenes, and their avowedly anti-picturesque subjects.
JR: It goes back partly to my frustration with the single frame as well as my interest in narrative; I've always worked with juxtaposition and sequence. But also, I was aware when photographing those vistas, of the conventions of colonial painting and photography: that way of surveying the land - all those images on top of a hill with an aloe in the foreground and the gorge edge giving way to a spectacular vista. And then, like the sequence looking up at the cliffs of Boa Vista, I couldn't contain that expanse in a single frame, I need a multiple image.
But also, I think there are a number of things happening across the whole body of work, photographically - in terms of how I was looking - as well as thematically; for example, the 'introductory' images - the sign, the bins on the beach, etc. - are quite different from the images of Roque Santeiro, or the Fort murals, or all the animals. And I needed to find a way to make the connections I felt were important. And because the work does invoke documentary, I also wanted to bring something of what I think of as the 'emblematic' to the fore.
MS: The phrases 'post-apocalypse' and 'improvisation' definitely link to what Okwui Enwezor identified in the Nadir - a 'dystopian hell, as if these spaces were originally part of the set of the Mad Max movies'.
JR: I'm beginning to realise this is unavoidable with me; but I did feel a bit like I was back in my Nadir landscapes. And especially at Roque Santeiro market. I was battling a bit with how to photograph there, but walking through the livestock section with all the tethered goats, old military tents and there are the video clubs, showing Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Senhor e Senhora Smith and all this wonderful crazy shredded paper adorning all the poles, there was something strangely festive in all of it. My remember thinking, 'this is where Mad Max meets The Canterbury Tales. But what struck me about Roque Santeiro and Boa Vista was how people are making their way through life. People say these are such bleak images, and yes, I get that Luanda could be seen that way. But it's full of intense and complex civic enterprise, which I was interested in registering.
MS: From a purely practical point of view, what procedures did you need to follow in order to shoot in Luanda and its surrounds?
JR: Luanda is not an easy place when it comes to photographing. You have to apply for a 'credential' and even then obtaining permission to photograph anywhere, even in seemingly innocuous places like on the beach for example, involves a long and slow process of negotiation. But generally, and in spite of this, I was received with openness and warmth. There is a lot of speculation that Roque Santeiro is going to be moved, so responses to me there were varied: some people thought my presencewas for advocacy, to record the conditions they were living under and they were very keen to have themselves and their homes photographed. Others took it as a definite sign that the market was going to be moved and they were fearful of being photographed.
MS: How do you see the relationship between these works and those you created for the Johannesburg Circa Now show in 2004, if any? The formal differences are obvious, but many of the concerns seem to be connected.
JR: I think they are very different and it's manifest in my approach. Johannesburg Inner City Works came out of the desire for a different representation of Johannesburg, one that didn't reiterate some of the stereotypes of this city as simply a dangerous and decayed place. And Johannesburg is an unstable space in complex ways. And negotiating it demands a certain, often visual, vigilance, part of which means you have to interact with your environment differently. I wanted to reflect my experience of Johannesburg. I wanted images that, when you looked at them, pointed back to your experience of what it feels like to walk or drive through the city with all its intense flood of buildings, space and motion, information and phenomena.
Luanda was different; it's not my place, I don't know it and my interest in it is very much linked to the ways it has figured in South Africa's past. And maybe that's where the need for specificity, careful looking and 'straight shooting' comes in. Because that kind of analysis helps you understand what you're looking at better...
MS: Do you view this as potentially an ongoing project?
JR: I would love to continue with it. How or where I would go with it, I'm not quite sure. But in the research for this project, I've come across a lot of stuff about the war and it's been fascinating. I've become really interested in the war, so something around landscape and testimony is what I'm thinking about at the moment.
