Sue WilliamsonPostcards from Africa: Cleaning fish, Goree, Senegal, 2021
The ongoing series ‘Postcards from Africa’ engages with vintage postcards from the early 20th century, originally produced by European colonists and photographers. Part of a global craze for this new form of communication, these postcards were intended to demonstrate colonisation’s civilising effect on the dark continent, or to depict Africa as an exotic landscape for European audiences. Sourcing these images from archives, Williamson reimagines them through intricate ink drawings, layering cross-hatching and a faded palette. The drawings retain traces of habitation or recent activity — ripples in the water suggest children at play, a canoe floats on a lagoon at dusk, on a deck, fish are being chopped up, a load of wood floats in mid air, —but the people once pictured as part of the landscape are absent.
In a text by Nkopoleng Moloi for Williamson’s exhibition, ‘Distant Visions’ in 2021, “Postcards hold traces of historical memory, and through her evocative ink drawings with their deliberate erasures, Williamson seeks to confront the painful and unresolved legacies of colonialism — an important juncture in world history that has never been fully reckoned with, and whose catastrophic effects continue to be felt by millions of dispossessed peoples across the globe. In this instance, the absence makes the violence visible”.
