The
Project ‘Photographs Beyond Ruins’ provides insight into the eventful history
of the small town Usakos in central Namibia. Due to its natural water resources
and geographical location at the edge of the Namib Desert, Usakos became the
centre of the influential Otavi Mines and Railway Company in the early 20th
century, which lead to a steady economic boom. This changed in the 1960s when
today’s capital Windhoek became the new railway centre. Many workers followed
the railway company and left Usakos. The economic downturn of Usakos came simultaneously
with the ruthless realisation of the apartheid laws, which were enforced by
Namibia’s colonial master South Africa (1915-1990). In the mid-1950’s they
started planning the radical reorganization of the town, whereupon the
population was forcibly relocated to new townships and segregated according to ethnicity.
The
Exhibition
The exhibition ‘Usakos – Photographs Beyond
Ruins’ focuses on this socially and economically challenging period. It is
based on the photographic collections of four senior women (Cecilie //Geises, Wilhelmine Katjimune,
Gisela Pieters und Olga //Garoës) who lived in the old location before the
forced removals. The first exhibition will permanently stay in Usakos, and a
second exhibition will travel through Europe and South Africa. The private
collections of these four women provide an alternative view of the history of
Usakos and Namibia in general, and are unique, as photographs produced and
curated by black people are almost non-existent in public archives. One particular quality of
these collections is that the people in the photographs are individuals known
by name and that the pictures were taken by local photographers. This is what distinguishes
the collections most from photographs in public archives, which very often picture
“white” people or “natives” as a group and not as individual human beings.
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