Terreno Ocoupado

synopsis: Jo Ractliffe made these photographs during her first visit to Angola’s capital, Luanda, five years after the end of the Civil War. ‘Terreno Occupado is an intricately woven essay about a fragment of Africa’ writes David Goldblatt. ‘Its black and white photographs resonate not with the dramatisation to which subjects of degradation easily lend themselves, nor with the urgency of “concerned” reportage, but rather with a plain factuality redolent with history and yet with that quality of portent and mystery in ordinary things, sought after by many in photography, but seldom achieved...This essay speaks with terrible eloquence of a kind of peace, a peace riven with the outcomes of colonialism, war, destruction, corruption and greed, of poverty and of little cause for hope, but nonetheless, and never to be underestimated.’