by DKP on Oct 21st, 2011
Jo Ractliffe, the photographer behind the series of haunting photographs depicted in Terreno Ocupado and As Terras do Fim do Mundo, explains her preoccupation with the “Border War” that took place in the 60s to 80s in Namibia and Angola.
Ractliffe says that while she was photographing the unrest of Cape Town townships in the 80s, she read about Angola. She says, “Until then, in my imagination, Angola had been an abstract place. In the seventies and early eighties, it was simply ‘the border’, a secret, unspoken location where brothers and boyfriends were sent as part of their military service.”
There are many myths about what is known to white South Africans as the ‘Border War’. Fought primarily in Namibia and Angola from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, it engaged a series of conflicts that merged into one of the most complex and protracted wars ever fought in Africa. Alongside its local raison d’êtres, the war in Angola also unfolded as a proxy Cold War, mobilised by external interferences, secret partnerships and undeclared political and economic agendas. All of these manifested in a range of deceptions, from the violation of formal international agreements to illegal operations, secret funding and the provision of arms. It was a war of subterfuge; a fiction woven of half-truths and coverups. Even now, over twenty years later, many of its stories have yet to be told.
Book details
Photo courtesy Stevenson Gallery
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by DKP on May 24th, 2011
Julia Halperin looks at the quiet desolation of Jo Ractliffe’s photographic exhibition As Terras Do Fim Do Mundo, which captures the ravaged landscapes that were once the battlefields of the Angolan Civil War. Says Ractliffe, “I’ve always been interested in the way landscape holds memory and violence, and the way landscape is contested, and how much people’s nationhood is connected to land.”
South African photographer Jo Ractliffe is very good at noticing things other people don’t. For two years, she traveled around the deserts of Angola with former South African soldiers, taking photos of a landscape that had been entirely ravaged by civil war. At the debut for the series — now on view at collector Artur Walther’s new Chelsea project space — the soldiers with whom she traveled finally realized what she had been up to. “‘Oh, that’s what you were looking at,’ they would tell me, ‘while we were over there looking at a minefield.’”
The series, “As Terras Do Fim Do Mundo,” marks Ractliffe’s United States debut. It is a chronicle of the now-empty battlefields of the Angolan civil war, fought between 1975 and 2002. “For 20 years, this war played out in a kind of nowhere land,” said Ractliffe. “It was a landscape that didn’t matter, that could be relegated to war.”
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by DKP on May 16th, 2011
Jo Ractliffe’s photographs chronicle a country, Angola, that is only now emerging from the crossroads. Meet this extraordinary photographer and hear her in conversation with William Kentridge-collaborator Philip Miller at the Troyeville Hotel’s supper club.
From the club’s notes on the evening:
“Our next guest is Jo Ratcliffe, a writer and photographer whose latest work is a collection of images from the battlefields of southern Angola to which she travelled in the company of men who fought there. Jo has worked previously on the physical and social landscape of Luanda, but in the black and white photographs of As Terras do Fim do Mundo (The Lands of the End of the World), Jo captures the eerie silence of the traces of war. Jo will be talking about Angola, the ex-soldiers, the battlefields, and how war is remembered and imagined.”
See you in Troyeville!
Event Details
- Date: Thursday, 26 May 2011
- Time: 7:00 PM for 7:30 PM
- Venue: Troyeville Hotel, 25 Bezuidenhout Street
Troyeville
Johannesburg | Map
- Guest Speaker: Philp Miller
- Cost: R150pp, excluding drinks. Bookings essential.
- To book: laurence@troyevillehotel.co.za, 011 402 7709
Book Details
- As Terras do Fim do Mundo by Jo Ractliffe
Book Homepage
EAN: 9780620485517
- Terreno Ocupado by Jo Ractliffe, Okwui Enwezor, David Goldblatt, Charles Skinner
Book homepage
EAN: 9780620422062
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by DKP on Feb 24th, 2011
David Krut Publishing presents two books by photographer Jo Ractliffe, Terreno Ocupado and As Terras do Fim do Mundo focusing on Angola after independence.
As Terras do Fim do Mundo
Last year, I went to Luanda for the first time. Five years had passed since the war had ended. I entered the myth.
– Jo Ractliffe
Five centuries of Portuguese rule came to an end on 11 November 1975 when Agostinho Neto, leader of MPLA, proclaimed the People’s Republic of Angola. But it also marked the beginning of Africa’s longest and most convoluted civil war. Divisions between the liberation movements, fuelled by Cold War politics and the interests of other African countries (notably South Africa), laid the foundations for the violent conflict that subsequently consumed Angola for nearly 30 years. It was only after the death of rebel UNITA leader, Jonas Savimbi, in February 2002 during a clash with the Angolan army, that military leaders on both sides agreed to a ceasefire, paving the way for a final political settlement and peace.
During the war an estimated 1.5 million people lost their lives; one in ten children under the age of fourteen lost one or both parents and 43 000 were separated from their families. In its wake four million people were displaced from their homes and nearly half a million others sought refuge in the neighbouring countries of Zambia, Namibia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Botswana, and even South Africa. The country’s infrastructure was all but destroyed as were eighty per cent of schools, in a country where half the current population is under 18 years of age. The widespread use of landmines also had devastating consequences that continue to be felt to this day. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that eighty million landmines were left scattered across the country and Angola has an amputee population of 70 000, 8 000 of whom are children.
Ironically, the civil war strengthened a sense of national identity and common purpose. But the challenges that face Angola now are profound. Most of its citizens have been resettled or re-integrated – although some 200 000 refugees still live outside the country and 62 000 remain internally displaced. But the majority are without land, adequate housing, water, health care, education or jobs. And although the country has now embarked upon the monumental task of reconstruction, it is one that despite Angola’s natural wealth and burgeoning economy is beset with problems.
Ractcliffe’s photographs chronicle a country only now emerging from the crossroads.
~ ~ ~
Terreno Ocupado
In 2009/10, Jo Ractliffe traced the routes of the “Border War” fought by South Africa in Angola through the 1970s and 80s. Following Terreno Ocupado, which focused on Luanda five years after the country’s civil war ended, As Terras do Fim do Mundo shifts attention away from the urban manifestation of aftermath to the space of war itself. Ractliffe’s black and white photographs explore the idea of landscape as pathology; how past violence manifests in the landscape of the present.
Jo Ratcliffe on photographing Angola:
I first read about Angola in Another Day of Life, Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book about events leading up to Angola’s independence. This was during the mid-eighties – some ten years after it was written. At the time, South Africa was experiencing a period of intense resistance and increasing mobilisation against the forces of the apartheid government, which was also engaged in the war in Angola. I was photographing in the townships around Cape Town – images that would form the material of a series of apocalyptic photomontages of urban wastelands, resettlement camps and dogs (titled Nadir). And amongst other books on landscape, dispossession and war, I was reading about Angola. Until then, in my imagination, Angola had been an abstract place.
Last year, I went to Luanda for the first time. Five years had passed since the war had ended. I entered the myth.
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