The repeated backs turned upon the viewer – in the aforementioned high school image, in Department of Rural Affairs, Town Hall, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (2007) and others – further cues the resistance these images offer. Such thwartings yield to more passive rebuffs in the emptiness of Tillim’s landscapes, which are so desolate they often verge on haunted. Indeed, the Avenues Patrice Lumumba inventoried here are silent and dusty: a medley of deserted lanes, empty parks, and vacant corners. Tillim’s interior spaces are only marginally more inhabited, with unoccupied hallways giving way to rooftops populated merely by the shadows of laundry. Even a game of street petanque, its players apparently vanquished, is endowed with this spectral cast (Game of Petanque, Porto Novo, Benin, 2007.) If, as Tillim writes, the Avenues Patrice Lumumba are “avenues of dreams,” then the virtual abandonment of these thoroughfares gestures to the forsaking of Lumumba’s dream. The citizenry they would serve seems to have fled. In place of images of the public, the entity traditionally twinned with the urban in representations of late modernity, Tillim presents us with scenes eerily evacuated of bustling city life. Void of humans, these images summon stones and cement to speak.
And to a great extent, it is stones, plaques and other monuments that pronounce in these photographs. Like Goldblatt, whose reckoning with the South African landscape seized upon its structures as monuments of history, so too Tillim apprehends the terrain and much within it as “de facto monuments.” This series especially homes in on actual monuments: wrapped statues, beheaded figures, and fallen sculptures are strewn through these urban landscapes, or stretch, Ozymandius-like, across the picture plane as in Colonial Era Governor of Quelimane, Avenue Patrice Lumumba, Quelimane, Mozambique (2008). Toppled from their perches, these statues become abbreviated markers of regime change, invested with all the hopes and disappointments that such transitions carry with them. Tillim’s string of monuments thus rounds out his larger exploration of the monumentalization of Lumumba himself: the cementing of Lumumba’s own ephemeral trajectory into the gravel of the boulevard.
New town square with wrapped statue of Agostinho Neto, Sumba, Angola, 2008
©Guy Tillim. Courtesy of STEVENSON, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Not only does naming solidify the transient passage of an individual into the material surface of a street, it also, as Paul Carter notes, maps the personal onto the public: “turning a private passage into a road.”(6) In Avenue Patrice Lumumba, the recurring image of the road beckons as a motif for picturing history – a public stretch of the imagination that carries past into future. Street demonstrations, protest processions and victory parades all unfold along the major arteries of the city, underscoring the road as indeed Tillim’s “avenue of dreams.” But these are fitful dreams; Tillim’s paths through the southern and central African postcolonies could not be further from the grand avenue and the colonial victory march. It is a dry understatement to affirm that in Tillim’s bleak intersections and lonely alleys, the Hegelian teleologies of progress and development frequently projected onto the image of the road ahead are cast in doubt. Triumphalist views of regime change wither on these avenues.
Perhaps a pivotal image in this respect lies not in a view of the street, but demands circling back to the Hotel Grande, Beira, Mozambique, where the motif of the road finds its serpentine echo in the imposing arc of the staircase that dominates the photograph. As radiant light spills onto the building’s stained floor, it activates a play between darkness and luminosity, between base materiality and ethereal heights, with the flourish of the staircase spiraling concrete to an apex of dematerialized light. Allegorizing the notion of passage – especially the exhibition’s signature motif of the avenue of passage – this image complicates the mythologized passing from the so-called darkness of colonialism to the light of independence. Such simplistic narratives of progress fold in on themselves in this spiraling space, curling around into a widening gyre. And then stretching back out again into the recursive loops of history these photographs summon.
Notes:
1) Leora Maltz-Leca, “On Street Names and ‘De Facto Monuments’: Guy Tillim’s Avenue Patrice Lumumba”, 2011.
2) Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago, IL; University of Chicago Press): xxiv
3) Guy Tillim, Exhibition statement, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 2009.
4) “Matter and Consciousness: An Insistent Gaze from a not Disinterested Photographer,” interview with David Goldblatt conducted by Okwui Enwezor 13 and 17 January, 1998 in Corinne Diserens and Okwui Enwezor, eds., David Goldblatt: Fifty-One Years. Barcelona, Spain: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona/ Actar, 2001: 37
5) David Goldblatt, Artist’s Statement for exhibition pamphlet of Home Land, held at the Market Theatre Gallery, Johannesburg, 1987.
6) Exhibition statement, Gallery wall text, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 2009.
6) Carter, The Road to Botany Bay xxiii.
