‘Empathic unsettlement’ in the field of vision: Jo Ractliffe's Vlakplaas in photographs and video

Abstract

I consider Jo Ractliffe's exploration, through photographic media and a video, of Vlakplaas, a site of apartheid-era subterfuge and violence. In the absence of an official historical archive about Vlakplaas, Ractliffe's practice engages with the violence, opacity and mediated narratives marking its presence historically. The work, an affective and performative intervention into historical and political spaces constituted by secrecy and erasure, might be imagined as an alternative archive. The artist's performative construction of photographs, which encompass visits to the site of Vlakplaas, and her own situated relationship to photographic practices in South Africa, is emphasised. I explore how Ractliffe re-imagines her Vlakplaas photographs through the video medium in order to elaborate on prior concerns with documentary photography and its truth claims. Criticism wielded against the artist's Vlakplaas photographs fails to consider the critical, conceptual, ethical and political capacities of the artwork's affective and empathetic response to a site that exists in an ongoing traumatic relation to apartheid-era violence. I mobilise Dominick LaCapra's (2001) concept of ‘empathic unsettlement’ and Jill Bennett's (2005) work on art and trauma, to argue for the work's particular capacities which reside in its refusal to objectify or speak on behalf of those tortured and killed, and for survivors transformed, in different ways, by lived experiences of racial violence and trauma in South Africa.