Residues

The Market Photo Workshop, in conjunction with WISER, is hosting Residues, a photographic exhibition comprised of work from Juan Orrantia and students from the Photo Workshop.

Residues ran from 12 August until 2 October 2009. The exhibition was opened on 12 August 2009 by Jo Ractliffe, an accomplished photographer and senior lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, and John Fleetwood, the Head of the Market Photo Workshop.

Juan Orrantia’s work addresses the residues of war in Mozambique. It juxtaposes situations, reflections and snapshots of people, places and objects in order to unsettle the idea of the “aftermath” of war through the banality of the passing of time. Juan’s work will be complemented by select works from Photo Workshop students who attended a training course in Maputo towards the end of 2008. 
Facilitated by Mozambican photographer Carlos Litulo and other local professionals, 20 students and alumni of the Photo Workshop produced various bodies of work during a number of extended training sessions in Maputo. The images produced were exhibited at various venues across the city.

These images will now form part of Residues, and will be exhibited alongside Juan Orrantia’s work. 
Juan Orrantia describes his project as an “ongoing journey through the inconspicuous presence of the past. It is an engagement with residues of time and imagination in the receding shadow of war. Seventeen years have passed since the end of the civil war in Mozambique. If one realises that this is the same amount of time that the conflict actually lasted, the idea of time becomes a convoluted experience, where residues accumulate and others dissipate. These images want to document and evoke the multiple feelings, thoughts, actions and experiences of those living this reality”.