In her fourteen-minute triptych video Indifference, part of the exhibition “The Earth Inside” curated by Vic Simoniti at the National Art Gallery of Namibia, Nicola Brandt invites us to explore the external and internal landscapes of three Namibian women against the backdrop of Namibia’s painful colonial past. Yet this is not a simple exploration of postcolonial subjectivities through the already established exercise of looking back at the women’s personal biographies. On the contrary, Indifference is a complex and subtle engagement with the personal and the collective in the face of what remains hidden or is left unspoken in Namibia’s contested narratives of the past, particularly the Herero genocide. The work attends to the presence of the unspeakable, evoking what Derrida calls “hauntology” and which is further explored in T. J. Demos’s illuminating book Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). Demos analyzes the work of artists who attempt to cast light on the ghosts and specters that haunt the personal, and their individual efforts at self-making and self-reflection. Such efforts inevitably affect the collective, and in Indifference the discursive evocation of the spectral casts a disconcerting shadow over the land, its people, and Namibia’s postcolonial nation-building.
In her work Brandt collaborates with the Johannesburg-based director and editor Catherine Meyburgh, a long-time associate of the artist William Kentridge. Meyburgh is no stranger to the theme of German colonial history in Africa and the darker associations of Germany’s Enlightenment-themed philosophical legacy, having assisted Kentridge on his complex artwork Black Box/Chambre Noire (2005).
Indifference reveals the relics and ruins of the colonial industrial landscape along the desert coast, and of the mining and violent expropriation of the land and its resources; these appear next to the unmarked graves of Nama and Herero laborers and prisoners of war buried along what will soon be the new railway line near Lüderitzbucht. These sequences are testaments to the colonial political economy and to the aesthetics of the spectral in Brandt’s work: the sound of the wind howling through the landscape and of the waves battering the rocks; the morning mist enveloping the industrial landscape only to evaporate under rays of sunlight piercing through the cracks of empty buildings. This is an aesthetic like no other: neither the clichéd touristic representation of Namibia’s landscape, nor the artist’s own fascination with an empty landscape battered by the forces of nature. It can haunt the viewer as it captures the juxtaposed and complex nature of subjective and collective narratives on the backdrop of the unspeakable.
When the images and voices of the three women appear in the video, Brandt’s subtle engagement with the spectral becomes not just political, but also personal and moral. The narratives of the three women’s lives appear rather mundane on the surface: a woman dressed in a Herero traditional costume sells her pictures to tourists in Swakopmund; an old German woman reminisces about a meeting with a new partner while tending a grave in the cemetery; and a young woman recently returned to the country reflects on the changed context of Namibia. Yet their stories also reflect the legacy of the colonial past, and that which constitutes the haunting in the making of postcolonial subjectivities in Namibia. The old German woman’s account is interspersed with nostalgic reflections, and Brandt’s rhetorical devices favor the unclear, unspoken, out of sight, and linguistically closed. Yet at moments the heavy-handed prejudices of a particular mindset are evident, and the aging German voice utters the following: “The blacks are now the masters, . . . the whites have no say anymore, . . . right, right, right?” But it is the setting of the woman’s room that perhaps is most revealing of the unspoken and the hidden; adorned with ordinary objects and photographs, it also contains a bookshelf with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Equally powerful is the Herero woman’s account. At first the viewer hears about her selling her image to mainly German tourists, as though it is merely another way of making money. The woman appears to enjoy what she does, she is very proud of her Herero dress, and the past seems but a distant memory. “This dress is very nice. . . . The fighting is in the past. . . . If they see me in this town they take pictures of me every day,” she states. And yet she is fully aware of her own history as a descendant of the genocide survivors and the impossibility of escaping this past: “Maybe when they go home they watch these pictures and they say . . . ‘these are the people we killed.’” In this sense, Hannah Arendt’s insight remains valid: “It is entirely right to say that we are haunted by the past.”
In Indifference the specters of the Herero genocide emerge in unexpected ways by illuminating the complex and contested relationship among the land, the people, and its history. It is a relationship of which the artist is very aware and one in which she is personally engaged. Of German Namibian descent, Nicola Brandt takes on the complex relationship between Namibian Germans and the painful history of Namibia by wearing a Herero dress. Like the rest of the video, this clothing and its significance are conveyed subtly. The artist does not gaze at the camera; in fact, she never reveals her face. Rather, we see only her dress in carefully choreographed gestures, slowly played in reverse, as if with a constant time lapse, perhaps to acknowledge the ongoing relationship between the present and past. It is with this sartorial statement—a German Namibian woman wearing a Herero dress introduced by German colonial settlers—that Indifference reveals the tension among the hidden, the unspoken, and the invisible in the making of personal and collective postcolonial projects.
