Jo Ractliffe
“My first visit to Vlakplaas undid me,” Ractliffe writes of the infamous site where South Africa's apartheid government ran its ‘counterinsurgency’ unit, named for the farm that was its HQ.
I was utterly unprepared for what I saw – or rather, didn’t see – that the ‘Vlakplaas’ I was looking for was nowhere to be found. There was nothing but a seemingly innocuous farmhouse, surrounded by a country landscape, next to the Hennops River. I went back and shot it with my Holga camera, in two continuous strips of black-and-white film, on the day of the country’s second democratic elections.
The resulting video work, Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting), is disarming in its visual simplicity, tracking slowly across these two celluloid strips. Without title, without context, the run-on scenes pictured might otherwise be unremarkable. But any pastoral non-specificity is denied by the film’s audio composition, which overlays recordings from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing of Vlakplaas co-founder and commander of the 'death squad', Dirk Coetzee, with a televised interview between former South African president FW de Klerk and Special Assignment host Max du Preez. Picturing the farm from the far side of its roadside fence, as seen from her passing car, Ractliffe’s video work speaks to the proximity yet ultimate inaccessibility of the then-recent past. The visceral, oddly affectless descriptions of violence and claims of ignorance that accompany these moving images only emphasise this impassible distance. Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting) remains, by art critic Sean O’Toole’s measure, “a benchmark of her oblique evocations of history through landscape.”
b.1961, Cape Town
To Jo Ractliffe, photography is “largely about guarding against loss,” of giving to memory an image, that it might be kept safe from forgetting. Her photographs more often speak of events past, considering the traces southern Africa’s recent conflicts have left on the land. She returns time and again to Angola, which remained at war for twenty-seven years, from the War of Independence, beginning in 1961, to the end of the Civil War in 2002. In 2007, she visited the country for the first time. “Until then, in my imagination,” Ractliffe writes, “Angola had been an abstract place…it was simply 'the border'. It remained, for me, largely a place of myth.” Absence is inscribed into all her photographs of that country, absence and the persistent presence of war's aftermath. More often, her titles alone establish their significance. Dusty landscapes are revealed to be minefields; rocky outcrops, the sites of mass graves. The atrocities of the past, now mute, are evoked in the bleak emptiness of the scenes she pictures. Ractliffe, preoccupied by all that photography necessarily leaves out, considers silence implicit to her medium. “I try to work in an area between the things we know and things we don't know, what sits outside the frame…these oblique and furtive ‘spaces of betweenness’.”