Delio Jasse, Luanda is an exercise in memory, installation view, Eva Maria Ocherbauer 2017.
Born Luanda, Angola (1980), lives and works between Lisbon, Portugal and Milan, Italy
Luanda is an Exercise of Memory 2016
as part of the series Cidade em Movimento (2016)
Cyanotype prints
Courtesy of the artist
The city of Luanda is haunted by its history. The architecture, the infrastructure and the inhabitants are an embodiment of the city’s social make-up and its continual change throughout time. It is an awareness of Luanda that drives Delio Jasse’s practice, and his assertion that Luanda is an Exercise in Memory is vividly portrayed in the series Cidade em Movimento.
Cidade em Movimento was produced in 2016 and comprises 24 cyanotypes that depict the materiality of the street and reflects upon the rapid social and economic changes that have underpinned recent shifts in the urban landscape of Luanda. A few years ago, Luanda was on every ambitious investor’s lips. Angola is the second largest producer of oil in Africa, and when the international price of crude oil reached a peak in 2008, the oil boom transformed the nation into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. With large infrastructure and housing projects rapidly changing its appearance, Luanda seemed to be leaving behind the country’s 27-year civil war. But since oil prices crashed in 2014, the impact on one of Africa’s richest and most unequal countries has been devastating. The same officials who boasted of Luanda’s sparkling ascent are asking for billions of dollars in loans.
Works in Cidade em Movimento (2016) were shot after oil prices fell in 2014 and convey a sense of stillness and disillusion: international property development projects that had encompassed the economic identity of Luanda prior to the crisis have been placed on hold and Luanda is mostly standing still.
Jasse reflects on the ambiguity of movement and stillness. The architecture of Luanda, simultaneously the background and foreground of the works, invite feelings of a city in waiting.
Within the picture frame, however, we witness the city’s inhabitants in transit, from one location to another. A paradox ensues as the camera freezes their movements in time and space. This static state is a contemplation not only on the economic crisis that resulted in Angola, but also of the political uncertainty and suspense of the presidential elections that would occur a year later. Jasse effectively portrays the quotidian manifestations of Luanda’s people who are seemingly wedged in their present lives as they meditate upon the ambiguity of their futures.
With this series, Jasse pursues his interest in printing techniques. The cyanotype is a fitting printing method for a series concerned with architecture (the architectural blueprint is a variation of this printing process), but the rich blue-green hue of the photographs contrasts sharply with the dusty, sandy atmosphere of the sprawling metropolis, creating a manifest distance with reality. Working exclusively with analogue techniques, including liquid emulsions and manual filters, the artist often disrupts his own imagery, showing tape marks, cutter lines and other signs of manual handling and editing. As Jasse writes: “The manipulation […] enables me to create a new image, one that didn’t exist before. The image thus occupies a space that is neither completely real nor completely fictitious, neither reality nor memory.”