Usakos: Photography Beyond Ruins exhibition opens today in Maputo

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Usakos: Photography Beyond Ruins exhibition opens today in Maputo

12:11 CAT | 06 Jul 2017

The Usakos: Photography Beyond Ruins exhibition opens today at 6:00 pm at Camões – Portuguese Cultural Center in Maputo and shows three private collections of historical photography owned by four women from the small Namibian city of Usakos.

Curated by Paul Grendon, Giorgio Miescher, Lorena Rizzo and Tina Smith, the exhibition consists of mobile panels with black and white photographs selected from the collections of women living in Usakos, juxtaposed with contemporary colour photographs by Paul Grendon. Historical information and two large maps are also presented.

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The exhibition presented at the Camões – Portuguese Cultural Center in Maputo is a travelling version of the permanent exhibition in Usakos.

Prior to its arrival in Maputo, the exhibition travelled in May and June to Pretoria in South Africa, and after Maputo, will go to Windhoek in Namibia.

Usakos was developed as one of the main axes of the first German, and later South African, railway system in Namibia, its urban planning strongly marked by apartheid segregation.

The photographic collections preserved by the four residents capture the rich physical and social landscape of the settlement from the 1920s to the 1960s. Most of the images were taken by local or itinerant African photographers, and evidence a vibrant aesthetic and visual culture in a cosmopolitan environment that opposed the restrictions and constraints imposed by uncompromising racial politics.

The resonances that the old photographic collections produce in the past, present, and future are taken up by Paul Grendon, who traces the layers of Usakos’ experience from colonialism to apartheid, still visible in the physical and social landscape of the city.

As a result of cooperation between the University of Basel in Switzerland and the University of Namibia, students from both institutions participated in the conceptualisation and assembly of the exhibition and were mainly responsible for its research dimension.

With the support of the Basler Afrika Bibliographien in Switzerland, a catalogue was produced which includes essays on photography and the urban history of Usakos, as well as images organised in two sections: black and white photographs featuring collectors and their historical collections and a section with colour images produced by Paul Gredon.

The Photography beyond Ruins exhibition is open Monday to Friday, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at the Camões – Portuguese Cultural Centre in Maputo until August 4.

This initiative is supported by Pro-Helvetica Johannesburg and Camões – Portuguese Cultural Centre in Maputo in partnership with Carl Schlettwein Stiftung Basel, the University of Basel Centre for African Studies, Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft Basel, Max Geldner Stiftung Basel, Museums Association of Namibia, Stiftung Mercator Schweiz, University of Namibia and Usakos Museum.

Source: IC-CCP Maputo