For three years, Richard Mosse worked with a discontinued infrared military surveillance film to photograph war zones in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where at least 5.4 million people have died of war-related causes since 1998. The resulting body of work, The Enclave, was presented at the Irish Pavilion of this year’s Venice Biennale, and is featured in a new book. Rebecca Horne evaluates the artist’s choice of medium:
The false-color infrared satellite film was initially used for aerial reconnaissance, showing healthy foliage as pink and red and thereby highlighting camouflage as blue or purple. Here, it is the medium for on-the-ground images from war zones of the Congo. As with the film’s properties that switch one color for another on the spectrum, viewers may become unsure of what they are looking at, and where it fits in the cultural spectrum. Through [Mosse’s] lens, a world of sinister machismo is seen in the hues of prom dresses and flowers. Is it an art project or a serious documentary? Either way, the images upend these tidy categories and introduce messy questions about objectivity and aesthetics.
Mosse recounts the hazards of working on the project:
Working in eastern Congo with a large wooden camera on a tripod was never going to be simple. You have to walk for days through the jungle to reach certain rebel groups, walking across shifting front lines, and brushing shoulders with suspicious guerrillas along the mucky track. The rain and lightning assault the landscape around you, sweeping through your tent at night. Perhaps the most frustrating, however, was the land’s entrenched corruption, and its greedy officials. Each little village seems to have a mwami (chief), his queen, and a retinue of immigration officials, intelligence officers, and police, who will keep you in a little shed all day, shouting or pushing papers around their desk, until they receive a $20 bill. The national army are the worst, extorting the local civilian population as they process through the jungle to sell their produce on market day. You can see why rebel groups have formed to fight the government. People are so burned out, disillusioned by insidious corruption that has become institutionalized over several generations. They are humiliated, and that humiliation expresses itself in the most horrifying violence, cycles of massacre and systematic sexual violence. Recently, the massacres have been so horrific that unborn babies have been cut from their mother’s belly while entire families are slaughtered by spear.
Mosse describes more about the project here. Gallery here.
(Photo: Platon, 2012. Farm near Bihambwe, Masisi Territory, North Kivu. This rich pastureland is fiercely fought over in an escalating territorial conflict. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.)
The Dish 