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In May 1960, Patrice Lumumba of the Mouvement National Congolais became the first legally elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The following month he interrupted carefully choreographed celebrations marking the country\u2019s independence from Belgium, to deliver a passionate and uncompromising denunciation of colonialism and its agents. He was executed early the next year by a firing squad under the command of Belgian officers. Had they not done the job there is ample evidence to suggest that the CIA would.<\/p>\n
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\u00a9 Guy Tillim. Apartment building, Avenue Bagamoyo, Beira, Mozambique, 2008<\/span><\/p>\n His name lives on: throughout Africa children are christened after him. Mali has a Lumumba Square, Kinshasa a Lumumba Boulevard, and there are streets in his honour as far afield as Budapest, Jakarta and Belgrade. Mozambique too has an Avenue Patrice Lumumba, a road which gives its name to Guy Tillim\u2019s latest body of work.<\/p>\n The eighty photographs that comprise his book picture the architectural remains of the colonial era – he has photographed apartment blocks, university buildings, city halls, administration offices and hotels for example, across Angola, Mozambique, Madagascar and the Congo. Speaking from Portugal where an exhibition of the work is set to open at the Serralves Museum in Porto he explains, \u2018Modernist architecture was the hook on which I hung the project, but it is not about that architecture – it\u2019s not a survey. Rather, these were places that I had got to know while working as a photojournalist; I had always been struck by the bizarre stage that they provided.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018Many of the cities built in the 60\u2019s and 70\u2019s expired shortly after, or even before, they were completed. In Mozambique and Angola, for example, the colonies were dispensed with in short order. They were given back. And very quickly people came and inhabited these buildings; they were nationalised – there was no private ownership. For me they make a very surreal landscape which I have always been interested in.\u2019<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a9 Guy Tillim. National Museum Grounds, Avenue 24 de Julho, Maputo, Mozambique, 2007 <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n He writes in the introduction that \u2019Patrice Lumumba\u2019s dream, his nationalism, is discernible in the structures\u2026as is the death of his dream.\u2019 Of the two – the dream and its death – it is perhaps the latter that is the most evident in many of Tillim\u2018s photographs. In the main, the buildings have fallen into advanced states of disrepair. The Grande Hotel in Beira, Mozambique for instance, is home to a semi-permanent population of displaced refugees; and the vaunting ambition of the building is undermined by the washing left to dry on a roof terrace balcony, or the cooking pots left out on the walkways. The hotel’s cracked and crumbling plaster and concrete – which presumably was once pure, modernist white – is now spectacularly and dramatically discoloured, stained in shades of filthy grey. <\/p>\n Whatever the temptation to read the photograph as some manner of indictment or condemnation, Tillim maintains a studied neutrality.\u2018I tried not to judge these colonial spaces, and say \u201cThis is what happened\u201d or \u201cThis is what went wrong here\u201d because I wanted more to try and convey it, or portray it, as something one sees almost as part of peripheral vision. I didn\u2019t want to make a documentary in the sense that I\u2019d come to know it, I wanted to make landscapes – often without people, and without entering into their private spaces. And I wanted to find a way of photographing those landscapes that was more neutral than me bringing my ideas of drama and action into a picture.\u2019<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a9 Guy Tillim. Likasi, DR Congo, 2007<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u2018Of late I\u2019ve been doubting my ability to judge how people live. I can see it, but I come from somewhere else and there is a danger of projecting myself and my ideas onto the people I\u2019m photographing.\u2019<\/p>\n The mentions of drama and action refer of course to his earlier career as a South African photojournalist, and member of the Afrapix collective, during the most turbulent years of the 80\u2019s and 90\u2019s. Now he sounds ambivalent about such work, worrying that \u2018I\u2019m not sure that African history is well served by photographs,\u2019 adding, \u2018Often in my practice I missed a lot of things while looking for drama, or what I thought was important. I missed things in the landscape, and I lost the trail of the holy grail – which is context. These new pictures of buildings, landscapes, the banal and the quotidian, are a way back into that search.\u2019<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a9 Guy Tillim. Maputo, Mozambique, 2007 <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Just as Tillim implies a reckoning with an earlier mode of practice, so there is also a sense in which the new work confronts issues regarding his own identity as an African<\/p>\n \u2018More than trying to present a collapsed history of colonialism, I was interested in the idea of situating myself …and in what is an African identity. Because it is a vexed issue: people have grown up – in my case under apartheid – under colonialism, or inhabiting the shell of the colonial period, and we form our identity, to an extent, through the buildings and landscapes around us. It is a complicated relationship and I was trying not to judge it, and to see it for its beauty.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018Because although these buildings come from a colonial past, they are indisputably African.\u2019<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Avenue Patrice Lumumba (Prestel, \u00a335)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Prints from the project are on display at The Photographers’ Gallery, London until April 12. <\/em><\/p>\n Avenida Patrice Lumumba is on display at Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal until May 17. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Guy Tillim’s latest body of work, Avenue Patrice Lumumba, collates photographs of modernist architecture taken in Angola, Mozambique, Madagascar and the Congo. The buildings recall the bombast of an earlier colonial era, and in their decay they suggest its fate.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Tillim spoke to Guy Lane about the pictures’ engagement with history, African identity, and forms of photojournalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1427,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[19],"tags":[393,3260,693,694,690,691,3259,66,394,46,688,689,400,692,49,48,341,232],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"tillim3.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.foto8.com\/live\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/tillim3.jpg?resize=470%2C312&ssl=1\" "\\"tillim3.jpg\\"")
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