Court records, Lubumbashi, DR Congo (2007), a room lined in with shelf upon shelf of manila folders, similarly cues the afterlives of colonial bureaucracies. In this case, these makeshift bundles of papers house a history of legal process that seems to jar with the violence associated with the DRC during the decade of civil war that followed Mobutu’s ousting. Here, the persistence of a judicial system amidst media portrayals of lawlessness and chaos assumes a valiant cast.What initially presents as a cluttered fileroom reconfigures into legal archive, suggesting, perhaps, that violence happens despite the best attempts of justice, not in its absence. Yet one cannot escape the futility of this enterprise: for what purpose do legal records serve during genocide? (Lubumbashi, capital of the Katanga province, was the site of student massacres under Mobutu in the early 1990s; and of genocidal violence in the late 1990s.) If this mass of records summons colonial infrastructures then, it operates in a sardonic mode, signaling how façades of law were used to paper over legacies of blood. The oft-repeated refrain that colonialism “gave” Africa its system of law and administration, providing the systemic groundwork for post-independence regimes, is here ironically recast to portray this vaunted organizational system as a brittle, ineffectual shell, useful only to record the violence sowed in its wake.
Administration office, Kolwezi, DR Congo, 2007
©Guy Tillim. Courtesy of STEVENSON, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Court records, Lubumbashi, DR Congo, 2007
©Guy Tillim. Courtesy of STEVENSON, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Although it is a frank, even harsh gaze that Tillim turns on his home turf, there are everywhere signs of resilience and hope: from the dying office plant still clinging to life as it emerges from a crate labeled “chloride,” to the ethereal delicacy of lace curtains strung from a window in the same city hall (Lubumbashi City Hall, DR Congo, 2007); from the heavenly light which streams through the corridors of Administration building, Antsiranana, Madagascar, 2007, punches the rose walls of Post Office, Likasi, DR Congo, 2007, and bathes the dank floor of the Hotel Grande, Beira, Mozambique to the satellite dishes and cell phones that root these images firmly in the present. Tillim’s rendering of that onetime grand hotel in Beira is exemplary in this respect, a monochromatic study in luminescence and shadow, elegance and decrepitude, that gestures to the contradictions that rive his series. The upwards thrust of this modernist staircase speaks, perhaps to a local rejection of the aspirations of tropical modernist architecture, a theme alluded to in several images, where what could easily be read as the symptom of social disrepair might equally prompt questions about why certain buildings have been abandoned. Yet, like the bland systems of colonial bureaucracy, the overambitious architecture that crumbles before us reveals little of itself or the values of those who built it. Many of Tillim’ cryptic edifices and terse monuments are thus mute: lined with a deadpan affect in which structures (and the people within them) are tendered as recalcitrant signifiers.
Grande Hotel, Beira, Mozambique, 2008
©Guy Tillim. Courtesy of STEVENSON, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
City Hall, Lubumbashi, DR Congo, 2007
©Guy Tillim. Courtesy of STEVENSON, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
In this way, Tillim pays tribute to South Africa: The Structure of Things Then, South African photographer David Goldblatt’s watershed 1998 series, while also marking his distance from the older man’s work. Shot in the closing decade of apartheid, Goldblatt’s Structures, his last great black-and-white magnum opus, , explores how the ethos and mores of a people manifest through what and how they build. And it probes how these buildings articulate rival claims of belonging to the land. Goldblatt’s project was, in his words, a “grappling with the weight and meaning of structures,”(3) which played out through an investigation of how abstract and immaterial forces of politics and ethics shape physical structures such as monuments, architecture and the built landscape. Images of domineering Afrikaner churches thrusting into space provide a foil for the delicate, transitory incursions of more ephemeral spiritual gatherings: in both cases, Goldblatt excavates, as he puts it: “the choices and accretions of our history…there to be read in the geology of South Africa’s structures.” (4)
To be sure, Tillim’s parallel focus on architectural structures, landmarks and monuments in Avenue Patrice Lumumba nods to Goldblatt’s guiding premise in Structures, as does his comment that: “Patrice Lumumba’s dream, his nationalism, is discernible in the structures, if one reads certain clues, as is the death of his dream, in these de facto monuments.”(5) While both photographers read the built landscape for the values and histories of the people that reside there, Tillim’s project departs from Goldblatt’s in the kind of traces he seeks. Tillim’s systems and structures are not merely elliptical, they are flatly amoral, and seem deeply resistant to the kind of evidentiary function to which Goldblatt marshals them. Ultimately Tillim’s photographs lack the secure moral compass that underpinned Goldblatt’s.
David Goldblatt, Dutch Reformed Church. Quelerina, Johannesburg, Transvaal. 3 November 1986. Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery.
David Goldblatt, The Jerusalem Apostolic Church in Zion. Melrose Bird Sanctuary, Johannesburg, Transvaal. 31 December 1987. Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery.
Presented in this slipstream of withdrawal, the photographs of Avenue Patrice Lumumba tend to turn in on themselves to reveal the instability of our own readings. Take High School, Athénée Royal, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (2007), where a group of nattily dressed teens chat in front of a hulking edifice, a concrete monster of a school with zigzagged teeth for windows. In such an image, Tillim scrapes away at the stereotypes of the postcolonial African city, mining the cryptic silence of peeling time to pose questions about the assumptions we make about blown-out school windows like this; or decrepit buildings; or fallen monuments. Ruins in the making rise before us throughout this series, but they are hardly picturesque. Rather, they present as defiant: spectral lesions of past conflicts among which the living circulate. And if the source of the wreckage is left provocatively open, so too are judgments about the persistence of these scars in the city. Indeed, whether this dilapidated school – and other structures of the series – gesture to the decay of the present or the final withering of the colonial past; whether they reveal the failed utopianism of the 1960s or the repetition of violent histories remains uncomfortably ambiguous.
Athénée Royal High School, Lubumbashi, DR Congo, 2007
©Guy Tillim. Courtesy of STEVENSON, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
