Good Hope is a fragmented visual and textual assemblage that orbits around the gardens and grounds at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa—a historic location, now an epicenter for anti-colonial resistance movements, and also the place of my birth. Named by the Portuguese in their ‘Age of Discovery’, the Cape’s position at the mid-point along the ‘Spice Route’ was viewed with great optimism for its capacity to open up a valuable maritime passageway, and the ‘refreshment station’ later established there set into motion flows of capital from ‘east’ to ‘west’. Good Hope brings together cumulative layers of documentary prose, personal essay and found photographic material, with sources ranging from apartheid-era trade journals, tourist pamphlets, National Geographic and Life Magazines, to current newspapers and family albums. It offers both an intimate and critical examination of White supremacist settler-colonialism in the present, and a questioning of the ethics and politics involved in the very acts of looking, discovering, collecting, codifying, preserving, naming, knowing, putting to language.
A limited edition chapbook version of Good Hope was co-published by iTi Press and Gato Negro Ediciones in August 2019—available for purchase at Citizen Editions—and a full-length book was published by MACK in November 2021. Good Hope was shortlisted for the 2022 Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award, and the Arles 2022 Prix du Livre in the Photo-Text Category. An excerpt from Good Hope is also featured in On Whiteness, by SPBH Editions.
Below are a selection of accompanying photo-sculptural installations and large-scale collages. [Installation photography: Nina Perlman]
