EXODUS OF THE DOGS

Okwui Enwezor

with an introduction by JO RACTLIFFE

Jo Ractliffe, Nadir (no. 15), 1988. Screenprinted lithograph, 55 x 86 cm.

INTRODUCTION
JO RACTLIFFE

Terreno Ocupado: Extracts from Letters to Okwui, November 2007

ve made three trips to Luanda this year and have accumulated a lot of quite diverse material. In making a final edit, I looked to extract those images that best articulate my concerns both photographically and conceptually. And I have to say Ive struggled quite a bit with this project and finding my way through it has been a real challenge! I didnt go to Luanda with any specific intention or preconception about what to photograph. Thats not entirely unusual for me; my general tendency is to work in response to an idea or situation rather than to predetermine thingsbeginning with something somewhere between contingency and intention. What was different though was Ive just about always photographed in South Africa; its my home and so its a place I can assume at least some familiarity with, even if the relationship is not always a comfortable one. Angola was different; Id never been there before and I knew little about it, beyond the war, so my position there, in relation, was going to be precarious. And also, my interest was particularly the imaginary of Angola, the place it occupies in South Africas history and the ways it has figured in this countrysand myimagination. So altogether, some tricky stuff for me to take on in this context. I first read about Angola in Another Day of Life, Ryszard Kapuciskis book about events leading up to Angolas independence. This was during the mid-1980s some ten years after it was written. I was very struck by that book, especially the ways it resonated with what was happening in South Africa thena period of intense resistance and increasing mobilization against the forces of the apartheid government, which took extreme measures in countering anything it perceived as a threatboth from within and outside its borders. There was virtually a continuous State of Emergency declared from the mid-1980s until the release of Mandela in 1990; SADF troops moved into the townships and of course, South Africa was also fighting in the war in Angola. At the time, I was photographing in the townships around Cape Townimages that would form the apocalyptic photomontages of Nadir.
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And among other books on landscape, dispossession, and war, I was reading about Angola. (Theres a wonderful passage in Kapuciskis book about the dogs in Luanda, abandoned when the Portuguese left, which inspired the dogs of my Nadir series.) But until then, in my imagination, Angola had been an abstract place. In the 1970s and early 80s, it was simply the border, a secret, unspoken location where brothers and boyfriends were sent as part of their military service. And although tales about Russians and Cubans and the cold war began to filter back all of which conjured up a distinctly different image from the one portrayed by the South African stateit remained, for me, largely a place of myth. All this was very much in my mind when I first went to Luanda in March 2007. It was five years since the war had ended (it was also the year of Kapuciskis death). My first impulse was to look for that mythical landscape; I had a vague notion to embark on a search for Kapuciskis lost dogs and I made a list of places from his book, starting with room 47 in the Tivoli Hotel, which was where he had stayed in 1975 (its still there). I was not looking to produce a commentary on the state of things in Luanda now. I went in search of something else. Emblematic things. Traces of that imaginary Angola. But ironically, as it turned out, I found myself needing to do almost the opposite once I was there. Which also brings to me the second challenge: how to photograph. I knew I wanted to shoot straight, as it were. For quite some time, even previous to this project, Id been wanting to break away from what seems to have become my signature modeplastic cameras, dissembled subject matter, furtive looking, those filmstrip-like sequences, and so on. I didnt want to rely on those conventions and their mediations as a way to speak. Rather, and especially in Luanda, I wanted to engage with photographic seeing in a more direct sensecareful looking, clarity, focus, and the acknowledgment of a subject, as it were. And while I took my plastic cameras, I decided to use my mediumformat Mamiyas and shoot with black-and-white film. All this calls up documentary in a much more immediate way

Vacant plot near Atlantico Sul, 2007.

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The cliffs of Boa Vista (polyptych), 2007.

than my work usually doesor at least, locates me within the convention, rather than my customary position of being somewhere at the edge of things. I was rather nervous about this; whether and how I would still be able to work critically, self-reflexively, without resorting to my usual strategies of destabilization. And this remains my ongoing dilemma with photography; my need for mimesis, an anchor to the real, but equally, my need to shift the fixity of the photograph, to call into question the acceptance of the real and insert something of the unreality of experienceif this makes any sense. Which also raised the question of my own position, as a photographer, in a place thats not mine, and how I could reflect this in the images. And maybe thats where the need for specificity, careful looking, and straight shooting comes in. Because that kind of analysis helps you understand who you are and what youre looking at better. So, all in all, this project has taken me full circleback to a landscape (real and imaginary) that occupied me twenty-odd years ago and to the same dilemmas I had then about photography and how to have my way with it. I have decided to make darkroom prints; I think print quality is critical and Ive grown a bit weary of the perfection of digital printing. Im more limited in the darkroom, but I think in silver prints I would better achieve the visceral texture of Luandas urban landscapeits hazy grittiness and those murky skies. Ive been experimenting with various papers, looking at different tones of black and whitetheres quite an interesting warm-toned paper that works well with my sense of the place; it gives the prints a rather curious old-fashioned look thats not the usual punchy black and white youd expect from contemporary documentary.
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Ive also been thinking a lot about how to organize all the material. Because I think there are a number of things happening across the whole body of work, both in terms of how I was looking as well as what I was looking at, Ive needed to find a way both to mark the distinctions as well as make the connections I feel are important. And more particularlyand this in mitigation of documentaryIve also wanted to bring something of what I think of as the emblematic to the fore. So Ive been playing with certain groupings of images and ideas around sequences and composite works; I was aware when photographing from the edge of Roque Santeiro looking across Boa Vista, of the conventions of colonial painting and photography, that way of surveying the landall those images from on top of a hill, usually with an aloe in the foreground and the

gorge edge giving way to a spectacular vista. And while none of my shooting was emphatically toward that end (in other words, intentionally panoramic) and consequently the diptychs, triptychs, and other sequences arent seamless, I quite like that off quality that resultssomething like stereoscopic images that have gone awry and wont line up for perfect 3-D viewing. Something that continues to be striking for me is the palpable presence of myth. Its partly in the way people talk about themselves and their narration of history, but also how they articulate the relationship of the past to the present and how this present works in terms of imagining a futureit seems to be a very particular understanding of things. Im sure some of this is my projection and of course, my foreignness, and theres also the thing of lan-

guage, which makes for rather interesting communication at times, but I have been acutely aware of something quite distinctive in Angola, for all that it may be very much a contemporary African city. Many times I felt as if I were entering a world that was simultaneously post-apocalyptic and medievalMad Max meets The Canterbury Tales. Some of this may have to do with my imaginings, or the strange contradictions in the built environmentPortuguese, Russian, Cuban, and now all the new oil highrises. But I was very aware of the past within the present, as if what I was looking at was a screen for something else. And this is what Ive wanted to work with in these images.

Smoking rubbish at the edge of Roque Santeiro market (triptych), 2007.

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Diorama at the Museu de Historia Natural (3), 2007.

Diorama at the Museu de Historia Natural (1), 2007.

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Mausolu de Agostinho Neto, 2007.

Man maintaining the lawn of the Monumento de Agostinho Neto, 2007.

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Sculpture in a park in Bairro Azul (1), 2007.

Detail of tiled murals at the Fortaleza de So Miguel, depicting Portuguese exploration in Africa (3), 2007.

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Detail of tiled murals at the Fortaleza de So Miguel, depicting Portuguese exploration in Africa (2), 2007.

Detail of tiled murals at the Fortaleza de So Miguel, depicting Portuguese exploration in Africa (4), 2007.

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Roadside stall on the way to Viana, 2007.

Diorama at the Museu de Historia Natural (2), 2007.

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Shack on the Boa Vista cliff edge, 2007.

Woman on the footpath from Boa Vista to Roque Santeiro market, 2007.

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EXODUS OF THE DOGS

Okwui Enwezor
remarkable aspect of Jo Ractliffes work is the idea, pursued with relentless asperity, that photography, above all else, is a way of seeing; that it is much more than what it depicts. Therefore, her work is never about using photography to produce evidence or as a medium of strictly documentary truth. Far more complex mechanisms are at work in her images, making her field of investigation an always contingent, throbbing space in which to fit together the pieces of the puzzle between an image that refers to an external other, and a visuality that references nothing but itself.1 These two terms of thinking are simultaneously grappled with in Ractliffes work, whose photographic procedures completely eschew any notion that an image can be produced from a sense of objectivity. In her work, to seeparticularly in the treacherous case of South Africa where, despite appearances of blackand-white moral clarity, things are far murkier than often revealedis to see beyond what the image reveals itself to be, whether as a reality on the edge of which the photographer stands as a witness, or as a self-sufficient visual field closely related to the modernist tautology of a work of art as autonomous from its referent. For twenty-five years these concerns have remained the constants in Ractliffes work, a regime of thinking that prioritizes analytical reflection. In the 1980s, as the larger international world began a concerted campaign against the ideology of the apartheid state, Ractliffe was part of a young generation of artists whose works began appearing in public in a moment of deep uncertainty and anxiety about the fate of South Africa. This decade was formative for many artists and writers, many of
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whom worked in the glare of dramatic historical events. Artists grappled with the place of the artistic image, the nature of representation, and the status of the work of art under conditions of political instability, social malaise, and forms of cultural resistance that made the practice of art as much an ethical purpose and radical refusal as it was a critique of the moral disaster brought about by the ideology of monocultural racism. The legacy of this period and its continuing and unfolding after-effects still inform Ractliffes work, yet in telling ways her work has moved on. Reflecting this period of strangeness, doubt, and apprehension, an eerie sense of doom pervades the early photographs and photomontages Ractliffe produced between 1985 and 1989. The settings of these imagesthe Crossroads squatter camp on the outskirts of Cape Town; Vissershok, a large landfill not far from the cityseem to mirror the larger rot in the heart of the apartheid system. The landscape of this pictorial thinking might appear to observers like a dystopian hell, as if these spaces were originally part of the set of the Mad Max movies, in which the bleak prospects of man and animal become finally joined. These harsh, unsentimental images, taken at a time of escalating confrontation between the apartheid regime and its opponents, are preternatural premonitions of the rusty rumbling sounding in the creaky joints of a decrepit and despised totalitarian machine. Produced over a period of intense and inspired work, as if in a fit of creative delirium, just after graduating with distinction from the University of Cape Town, the images from Crossroads inscribe a haunted, depopulated, ransacked landscape. LookCrossroads, 1986.

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author, Ryszard Kapuciski, reports on the end of the Portuguese empire in Angola after the defeat of the colonial system in 1975 by the armed resistance, led by the bespectacled poet, surgeon, and Angolan revolutionary/national hero Agostinho Neto. Ractliffe sent me a passage from the book, in which Kapuciski describes, with lyrical precision, the condition of the port city and capital, Luanda, just before it fell to the rebels. Luanda had become a city of dogs. Kapuciski describes a scene in a bravura passage of reporting and narrative distillation:

The dogs were still alive. They were pets, abandoned by owners fleeing in panic. You could see dogs of all the most expensive breeds, without mastersboxers, bulldogs, greyhounds, Dobermans, dachshunds, Airedales, spaniels, even Scotch terriers and Great Danes, pugs and poodles. Deserted, stray, they roamed in a great pack looking for food. As long as the Portuguese army was there, the dogs gathered every morning on the square in front of the general headquarters and the
Vissershok, 1988.

(Left and Right): Crossroads, 1986.

ing back now, these photographs are nothing less than icons of damaged lifeblack and white subjects alikeand the archaeological site of a brutal necropolitics.2 In one photograph, fresh tire marks left on muddy ground lead into a far-off space littered with the mangled remainders of bulldozed shacks that are scattered like carcasses across the charred landscape. In another, an unstable makeshift architecturepieced together with nothing more than cardboard, ragged tarpaulin, and twigstotters on the edge of a refuse-strewn pool of putrid water. In yet another, stray dogs scrounge for food; in the center of the image an albino dog stares with leaden eyes at the camera from a small hill of garbage, while just beyond, indecipherable figures lounge amid ramshackle surroundings. These images invite comparisons to apocalypse. In Vissershok, a series shot in Cape Towns Vissershok Landfill, one glimpses a vast scene of labor filled with scavengershumans and animals alikewho feed on the scraps deposited by an oblivious and well-fed populace far removed from the gnawing hunger that drives many to the garbage heap in a bid for survival. Vissershok is the most sinister of images, a zone of ecological debacle that leaves the viewer peering into its apocalyptic insinuations. Ractliffe photographs its many contours with such
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ebullient restraint, placing her vantage point at a slightly distant remove. The culmination of this period of intense work, in which depopulated, ominous landscapes and stray dogs serve as symbols of moral decadence, is Nadir, a series of photomontages set in spaces even more bleak and threatening than those in Crossroads and Vissershok. In fact, most of the backdrop of Nadir derives from images from the two earlier series. In Nadir, Ractliffe shows her cards, addressing directly what she sees as apartheids ideological obsolescence. The stars of the series are packs of dogs, depicted in an array of settingsa tented desert work camp reminiscent of a scene in J. M. Coetzees 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians, a montaged landscape of oil drums filled to the brim with rubbish, a busted oil pipeline snaking through what appears to be a stadium of some sort against a horizon filled with dense, black smokeand configurationsas a fornicating lot, in pairs, or as solitary forms racing through portentous spaces in a blur of fury and mangy fur. Nadir is a work of unremitting power and forceful intent. In it Ractliffe shifts radically from the articulated landscape to an oneiric, fugue-like mythopoesis. Her inspiration for this body of work was the book Another Day of Life, 1976, in which the Polish
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sentries fed them canned NATO rations. It was like watching an international pedigreed dog show. Afterward the fed, satisfied pack moved to the soft, juicy mowed grass on the lawn of the Government Palace. An unlikely mass sex orgy began, excited and indefatigable madness, chasing and tumbling to the point of utter abandon. It gave the bored sentries a lot of ribald amusement. When the army left, the dogs began to go hungry and slim down. For a while they drifted around the city in a desultory mob, looking for a handout. One day they disappeared. I think they followed the human example and left Luanda, since I never came across a dead dog afterward, though hundreds of them had been loitering in front of the general headquarters and frolicking in front of the palace. One could suppose that an energetic leader emerged from the ranks to take the pack out of the dying city. If the dogs went north, they ran into the FNLA. If they went south, they ran into UNITA. On the other hand, if they went east, in the direction of Ndalatando and Saurimo, they might have made it into Zambia, then to Mozambique or even Tanzania.

Perhaps theyre still roaming, but I dont know in what direction or in what country. After the exodus of the dogs, the city fell into rigor mortis. So I decided to go to the front.

Nothing could be more gripping, and Ractliffe more than equals the captivating, sinewy climax, and uses the composite structure of the photomontages to bind Nadirs various aspects, except, rather than Luanda, she was describing South Africa, just as the whites began their mass exodus, in anticipation of the coming of black political power. Nadir, though, is more than about South Africa and Angola; it reflects the general ambiguity of white Africans relationship to the continent at moments of transition to black African rule. When viewing these images, Coetzees controversial novel, Disgrace, 2000, comes to mindparticularly the scene where the dogs are slaughtered. These images irrefutably secured Ractliffes stature as one of South Africas most rigorous and compelling artists. Looking at the images today, twenty years after they were made, reminds us of

how great works of art endure, and the vistas they are capable of opening. The images show us her achievement as an artist. In the early 1990s, Ractliffe relocated from Cape Town, that bastion of colonial life where she was born, to Johannesburg, a city still very much connected to its history of gold-rush buccaneering. After losing all her professional photographic equipment in a theft, and unable to replace it in the immediate term, she began experimenting with a 120mm plastic toy camera called the Diana. Her experiments with this camera yielded a group of rough, smudgy, almost tactile black-and-white-photographs, whose mostly grayblack tones appear as if filmed with a movie camera. The darker mood of these images contrasts radically with the earlier photographs, especially those from Vissershok, which look as if they were literally excavated from a limestone quarry given the harshness of the almost blinding whites of some of the pictures. After the fever of the work of the 1980s, she was working in a slower, more deliberate fashion, and she began to hatch a new body of work that saw her shift to a more experimental, riskier photographic position.
Nadir (no. 16), 1988. Screenprinted lithograph, 55 x 85 cm.

Beginning in the 1990s, Ractliffes mtier becamethis has proven to be unavoidable in much South African artintimately concerned with the shifting conditions of the South African landscape and its urban spaces. ReShooting Diana, the first major series she produced during the decade, saw a shift in her persistent use of the road trip as a mechanism for moving across the expansive, ancient landscape of the country. In her move from Cape Town to Johannesburg, she drove cross-country in a 2,000-kilometer journey through the Great Karoo Desert, stopping and photographing or shooting from her car window as she traveled through the small towns that dot the route. The idea of road trip, or the photographic journey, was undertaken almost in the fashion of Robert Franks epic journey in 19551956 across the United States that culminated in a landmark documentary photography book, The Americans.3 But for Ractliffe, the road trip was more a conceptual structure for mapping the epic imagination of South Africas varied spatial settings. Yet, by no means does her project resort to the seduction of the grandiose. Instead, in reShooting Diana, a long solitary

Nadir (no. 14), 1988. Screenprinted lithograph, 54.5 x 87.5 cm.

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drive through the Great Karoo Desert strongly resists the clich of the road trip in which the photographer transforms herself into a tourist of her countrys heartland. Rather than large themes, the images are more like fragments, notations that sidestep mordant narratives of the self, country, or identity. Rather than a search for identity, she was dispossessing, through these images, any narrative that may lead to identification. As she documented the fleeting scenes, lives, and communities aban-

doned in the forlorn and isolated way stations set in unforgiving environments, the images of reShooting Diana are recast, not as a rite of passage, but as a pictorial vehicle of defamiliarization and dedramatization of the allure of touristic discovery. In her gestures and experiments with visual complexity, and her choices that eschew the heroic for the antiheroic, Ractliffe is unlike her male counterparts. Her work cuts against the grain of what could be termed the camera-ready. Yet her work is invested

in the kind of humanism from which some of the most outstanding works in South Africa have been made. Her humanism is not about social situations, nor about the depredations that oppress daily life in South Africa, but about the inchoate, about moments yet to achieve full definition. Though her work exists alongside the work of better-known male artists and photographers notably Guy Tillim, Santu Mofokeng, David Goldblatt, and Zwelethu Mthethwaand may some-

times invite comparison with their work, such comparison is immediately blunted by her singularly unique approach to documenting the South African landscape. Ractliffe tends to be more interested in the quality of the unseen, the elapsed, the yet to emerge, rather than focusing on the ponderous concreteness of moments that often give South African spatial situations an effusive realism depicting readymade symbols of ideological decadence. In both their colonial and their apartheid

(Top left): reShooting Diana (barrier), 199095. (Top right): reShooting Diana (Christmas), 199095. (Bottom left): reShooting Diana (dolls head), 199095. (Bottom right): reShooting Diana (microlite), 199095.

(Top left): reShooting Diana (refinery), 199095. (Top right): reShooting Diana (welcome), 199095. (Bottom left): reShooting Diana (strawberry man), 199095. (Bottom right): reShooting Diana (butcher), 199095.

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Vissershok, 1988 (diptych).

characteristics, the South African landscape and urban spaces are infinitely photographable. They are quintessentially camera-ready spaces that consistently produce spectacular images. The countrys artists and writers are obsessed with the imagery. Such imagery of South Africa tends to fix on the excess of the seen, as confirmation of the cameras ability to reveal, expose, and deliver a judgment on the spatial mechanisms and visualizing systems that give rise to the excesses and distortions of the colonial baroque. To its artists and writers, the South African landscape is akin to a corpulent body to be exploited. This infatuation with the landscape as exhibit A has served as pictorial fodder for the excess of the seen, what the South African writer and critic Njabulo Ndebele has derided as social exhibitionism. Landscape and spacelike the stark symbols of racial identity, be it in politics, art, literature, or journalismis an inexhaustible leitmotif in South African representation and the ultimate aesthetic cri de coeur; a means of leveraging critical credibility against the opacity of any aesthetic asceticism and visual inhibition. Ractliffes work has carefully avoided modes of social exhibitionism that exalt the binaries of good and bad, black and white, oppressor and oppressed, native and settler. Throughout her work she has developed a practice of rigorous asceticism, a way
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of working that questions the camera-ready typologies that have been the most visible images of South Africas complicated landscape. We cannot, however, read her images reductively as a repudiation of the facts to be found on the ground, a situation that other images exploit, but as a subtle critique of documentary literalism. Her choice of subject matter and her approach to photographing her surroundings is predicated on unraveling and revealing those qualities of space and habitation that are generally left unaccounted for or unremarked upon, psychic disruptions that accompany the documentation of absence; of what is not there, missing, erased: in short, the inadequacy of pictorial certainty. An exemplary work in this regard is Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting), a sequence of photographic images and accompanying video initially photographed with a disassembled plastic toy Holga camera similar to the Diana. Because of what the site represents, the manner in which Ractliffe depicts this site clearly encapsulates her conscious deviation from documentary literalism. Driving around the perimeter of the farm, she photographed the edges of the property, but avoided direct documentary depiction of the farmhouse as evidence. Rather, she focused on the immensity of the silence around the property, thus

amplifying the farms solitariness and isolation and directing the viewer to the two qualities that must have made Vlakplaas appealing and conducive for the purposes for which it was deployed. Vlakplaas is an ordinary-seeming, innocuous farm, with a farmhouse standing behind a low chain-link fence, in a slightly unkempt field of brush and grass, and a well-trodden unpaved road curving into the property. Despite its unassuming, even drab quality, the site is one of the most grotesque of apartheid landscapes. Located on the outskirts of Pretoria, the farm was used by secret apartheid death squads as a place where captured opponents of the regime were tortured, killed, dismembered, and incinerated. However, nothing in the image of this normatively ordinary place has the capacity of conveying its horrific history, nor the ability to register, in visual language, the horrors that took place there, the appalling crimes that were committed against political activists in the name of state ideology. However, to be clear, the quality of absence in the images of Vlakplaas that Ractliffe excavates is fundamentally different from any idea that will situate and posit the scene of the crimes as unrepresentable. Paradoxically, Vlakplaasas a site in its very innocuousnessfalls outside Ndebeles category of social exhibitionism, simply because its brand of exhibitionism reveled in meaningless and sadistic violence, in the grotesquery of unaccountability either before the law or to the public. Because none of these qualities is depictable, Ractliffe nevertheless did not attempt the kind of easy ambivalence that would have insisted on the term unrepresentable as a way out of the moral conundrum of depicting Vlakplaas. For indeed, the site had become an object of fascination and had acquired a legendary notoriety that demanded that it be addressed not as a symbol, but as a site. She thus resorted, in the video part of the work (after initially photographing the site in a series of single-frame images, Ractliffe rephotographed them by slowly scanning a handheld video camera across the images to produce the accompanying video) to audio snippets of testimony by Dirk Coetzee, one of the principal agents employed at Vlakplaas, recorded during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings to which he had applied for amnesty, in

which he describes what viewers are unable to see in the images. In so doing, Ractliffe shows that the crimes of apartheid were not always photographable from a conventional viewpoint, and oftentimes do slip out of view of the cameras tracking system. Yet, at the same remove, she shows that such subjects can be representable through other devices, through acts of testimony. If Ractliffe exploits the condition of the unphotographable, the ur-image of erased violence, it is to call attention to the gaps that lurk in the pictorial imagination. She turns those gaps into a revealing critique of the opacity of social exhibitionism when it avoids unremarkable spaces for the more satisfying images of documentary literalism. Ractliffes other works are of this nature. They are generally committed to analyzing the unseen, yet without sacrificing her full engagement with representing the subject. Many years of observing her work have revealed her habits of working, which invariably involve both procrastination and slowness. Her method shows that she privileges rudimentary equipment such as toy cameras, often disassembled to create palimpsests, overlapping images that have no fixed framing or pictorial parameters, over more technically sophisticated mechanisms. She uses the unfixed state into which she has engineered her equipment to propose open-ended, deeply contingent images, a quality of critical analysis that is fundamental to her photographic process of slow accretion. Because the images have no framing device, many of her photographs take on visual qualities that are akin to techniques of mapping, panning, and surveillance. These result in images that appear as continuous strips of film and individual frames in which the temporal and spatial relationships between the images are consciously collapsed. If, over the last two decades, Ractliffe focused a great deal of her analytical powers on formulating a photographic antidote to documentary literalismthrough the overlapping of images provided by the Diana, Holga, or similar cameras, or through the blurring of spatial and temporal frames produced by the camerathe foundational images of her career actually began, as described earlier, with single frames. In the early work, human presence alluded to destruction or ecological devastation,
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Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting), 1999. Pigment print, 40 x 230 cm.

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Vissershok, 1988.

while animals became mythical symbols of wildness, menace, and freedom. Yet, in her inimitable way, Ractliffe also gives us animal metaphors whose images can be observed as reflecting both the wretched state of the animals themselvesdogs in this caseand the vestigial intimation of their untamed nature. Dogs in a way became the metaphor for exposing what were essentially the dog days of the repressive state, of life under apartheid. In one of these early photographs (part
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of Vissershok) Ractliffe takes the most emblematic of subjectsa landscape choked with refuse which, taken at face value, is often used to represent the dystopian quality of African urban spaceand instead transforms it into an image of improbable poetry, of agitated motion, as white birds in flight buzz like flecks of confetti above the dematerialized detritus atop which stand a group of figures, and a truck just off the edge to the left, and a line of electric pylons framing the distant horizon. This image

is exemplary of Ractliffes approach: to show the subject of an image, but only in increments or as a composite of a larger complex of related images, objects, and meanings, rather than as one overwhelming, conclusive image fixed as one meaning. This photograph is part of a continuous exploration of urban forms, landscapes, street scenes, and processes of anomie in which she captures attributes of spatial deformation that address different conceptions of African urbanity. In 2007, twenty years after reading Kapuciskis stunning book and his description of Luanda; five years after the thirty-year civil war that ravaged and depopulated Angola, after the armistice between the government and the rebel forces of UNITA ended the war upon the death of its leader Jonas Savimbi, Ractliffe finally made her way to Luanda, to a city which, until her arrival, had remained a myth in her imagination. Terreno Ocupado, a large group of black-and-white photographs, was shot in Luanda: from Porto Quipiri leading to Caxito along the route to the city, to the surrounding townships, the tented settlement of Nas Tendas, markets such as Roque Santeiro, the port bay at Ilha (a sliver of land extending into the bay of Luanda, farther up on the coast is Boa Vista), and assorted landmarks. Among the formal colonial architecturemost of them in various states of disrepair or refurbishmentare the derelict openair cinemas with grand names like Esplanada Miramar; the refurbished Museu de Historia Natural, first opened in 1938, and shut down by the war until it was reopened in 2002; the colonial architecture of the Banco Nacional de Angola lined with tiled murals depicting various scenes of the Portuguese presence in and colonization of Angola; and Forteleza de So Miguel, the old fort of the city built in 1576, when Luanda was founded, almost a century after the Portuguese landed in Angola in 1483. These images of the city, while fascinating, are the least dramatic of the images that form Terreno Ocupado. In this project, completed in late 2007, Ractliffe reveals in Luandas teeming shantytownsdespite the precarious state of urban infrastructure and serious deficits in social amenitiesa sense of humanism in the citys locations, a far cry from the familiar spatial givens of South Africas intractable

urban instability. Yet the view of Luanda is not at all sentimental, for inasmuch as the images excavatewith unremitting empathy and directness modes of urban sovereignty of the inhabitants, the images do not retreat from the vestigial harshness that mark the shantytowns as urgent zones of official neglect. She offers us a view that represents part reality and part mythology. As Ractliffe writes in her introduction, when she arrived she entered the myth,4 alluding both to the story of Kapuciski and to the history of cold-war politics that made Angolafrom the 1960s to the 1980sa center of ideological competition between South Africa and the United States, supporting the anticommunist UNITA and FLNA respectively, on one side, and the Soviet Union and Cuba supporting MPLA on the other. The inhabitants of the vast shantytowns are part of the history of this competition. In fact, manyif not mostof them are double refugees, displaced by both ideological and colonial wars. Over the last decade, images like these, which reflect African spatial conditions as a series of intractable urban anachronismsa condition which the Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas sees positively as the fate of cities of the future, and which the Ghanaian/British architect David Adjaye, in his ongoing photographic studies of African cities and urbanism, contestshave been objects of critique as participating in forms of Afro pessimism; a situation whose effect of extreme impoverishment may lead some to devalue the inherent human qualities of African cities. The question that demands to be answered is how Ractliffes photographic analysis departs from the urban mythologies and clichs of African and Third World cities. She does confess to her own evident discomfort at photographing in such a setting, if only because, as a white outsider, her motivations may be questioned, and the resulting images she has produced may provoke accusations of taking part in an ethnographic exercise and documentary literalism. But Ractliffe is an artist who not only thinks carefully about conditions in which her images are produced but also presents her work in such a way that the images reflect that thinking, and actively involves the viewer in the act of thinking through the situations depicted in the images. The first image in Terreno Ocupado sets the critNka 91

View over Boa Vista towards the city (diptych), 2007.

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ical context and blunts any suggestion of ethnographic liberties being taken or documentary literalism being indulged. Photographed throughout and printed in dusky black and white, the establishing shot is an image of a landscape covered in dry, wiry grass, the kind that appears just as the land is about to lie fallow. In the immediate foreground of the image, bristly strands of the grass spread out on either side of the image against the backdrop of a steel-gray sky. To the left of the image, a sharp sliver of white, partially concealed by the spreading grass, reveals what looks like a drying-out stream or patch of sand, but in fact, is a lagoon. In the middle ground is a structure that focuses the image of the landscape and defines its active condition. The structure, a billboard, stands on ground that slopes slightly upward, so that it could be read as one approaches it. Written in Portuguese in thick, peeling black lettering is the phrase: Terreno Ocupado. A rough translation of this text from the Portuguese would read occupied land. Not only does this phrase lay down the context within which this group of photographs can be understood, it defines the means by which we can read the entire series as part of the analysis of space, territory, boundaries, and power. In other words, this is in fact a place that is actively occupied, rather than a ruined or abandoned landscape. Terreno Ocupado reflects part of the struggle for space familiar in places where the landless are aggressively seeking rights to take possession of land. The land they seek to own is either being abandoned or is the subject of speculative development that often displaces large populations once their informal settlements are rezoned for luxury seaside dwellings. The vast shantytown of Boa Vista, for example, perched on a majestic cliff (half eaten away by erosion, revealing a yawning abyss spewing smoke from below) overlooking the harbor and the sea, is not only a place coveted by developers and their government allies but also a context of new urban politics. The residents of Boa Vista and the merchants in the citys sprawling market Roque Santeiro (another coveted urban property) have be(Top): Women minding pigs, Roque Santeiro market, 2007. (Middle): Tethered goats, Roque Santeiro market, 2007. (Bottom): Drying fish on the beach at Ilha, 2007.

come embroiled in new debates reshaping the urban forms of African cities, fighting displacement and forcible relocation to areas outside the city. Ractliffes images are invested in the fascinating urban iconography of spaces like Boa Vista, a neighborhood constructed on a topography of such extreme precariousness that one wonders how the structures remain fixed in place on that eroding ground, and marvels at the human qualities they contain. In a way, these images of Luanda are unlike anything Ractliffe has ever attempted, given her proclivities toward the inadvertent and her reluctance to engage in full disclosure. She is however, unflinching in rendering these scenes of urban decay. She shows us, without any sense of moral judgment, areas of structural instability: houses cobbled together out of nothing more than cardboard, cloth, and corrugated sheets of zinc; shacks sitting in smoldering pits of oily miasma, or perched on the edge of vertiginous precipices; houses in gullies threatened by the next mudslide or surrounded by a ramble of other dwellings looking out to the sea below and the hazy horizon. Despite the extremeness of these scenes, a surprising quality of Ractliffes point of view of Luandas urban spaces, between its modern seaside high rises, mud architecture, unpaved roads, and grand colonnaded bank interiors is her avoidance of documentary literalism. Here the field suddenly vibrates with human presences, showing the landscape as a zone of active civic, economic, cultural, and political processes. In an urban context in which the poor and the dispossessed seemingly have neither claims nor rights to land, these powerful images finally untie themselves from the dramatic description of Kapuciskis dying city, revealing a series of complex social and urban problematics that bind the poor and the wealthy alike to a struggle between land and sea, tenancy and power. The social and political ramifications of this debate, which are in ample display in the rest of the series, might also prove to be an oblique way for Ractliffe to reflect on the searing debate surrounding land and the landless in Southern Africa, from South Africa to Zimbabwe. In this sense, Terreno Ocupado, both as an image and a phrase, is a terrific way of seeing, a way

of piercing through the thick, smoky fog that chokes the low sky overhanging the bustling shantytowns and their depopulated surroundings, from Crossroads to Vissershok, from the desolation and pessimism of Nadir to the active struggle unfolding in the blighted topography of Boa Vista, from the wreck of the capsized Chinese ship rusting at the dock in Ilha to the forgotten small towns lost in the vastness of the Great Karoo. Ractliffe has photographed these disparate social realities with penetrating insight and visual austerity, sometimes employing them as allegorical entities, at others as part of the wild rumors of existence. But never has her work adopted the simplifying edicts of documentary literalism nor ever indulged in the excess of the seen that often mars the images of social exhibitionism. Terreno Ocupado sits precariously between the skepticism of Koolhaass idea of cities like Lagos or Luanda as the paradigms of cities to come, or it might foretell yet another urban reality described by the American social commentator Mike Davis as the planet of slums.5 Either way, Luanda will not be a dying city any time soon, even when the dogs join the exodus of fleeing soldiers; on the opposite side of the road, the returnees are making their way back into the heart of the city. Notes
This essay was first published in Jo Ractliffe, Terreno Ocupado (Johannesburg: Warren Siebrits Modern & Contemporary Art, 2008). 1 See Jacques Rancierre, The Future of the Image (London and New York: Verso Press, 2007). 2 See Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics in Public Culture 15, no. (Winter 2003): pp. 1140. Available online at: http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/icuss/pdfs/Mbembe.pdf or: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/research/harc/Events/necropoliticsmbembe.pdf. 3 Robert Frank, The Americans (Paris: Delpire Press, 1958. Reprint, Steidl / National Gallery of Art, 2008; available in both Chinese and German editions). 4 See Jo Ractliffe, Introduction in Terreno Ocupado. 5 See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London and New York: Verso Press, 2006).

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