Just outside Viriambundo there is a building with three portraits painted on the wall: Fidel Castro, Agostinho Neto, and Leonid Brezhnev. While I photographing, a young man, a teacher from a school close by, came to talk to me. He curious about why I would want an image of these three men. We chatted a while. He interested in computers and the internet and the ways they could aid education in places faraway like this. He did not share my excitement about this image of the 'holy trinity'. He said that the war had gone on too long and now it had to be left behind, that Angolans wanted to move forward and that the future about different things. (1) --Jo Ractliffe Southwestern Africa, including present-day Angola, Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa, remains a contested space rife with conflict. From postcolonial dissent within African nations, and civil wars doubling as proxies for the Cold War, to the oppressive contrivances of apartheid, this region of the African continent is a labyrinth of volatility. Without a doubt, this capricious state has come to define the cultural imaginary' of the region. Despite the seemingly shared subjugation across these countries, for some, like South African photographer Jo Ractliffe, many of these conflictual and contested areas are Active, mythical places. For Ractliffe, as a white South African, Angola, in particular, was simply 'the border,' a secret, unspoken location where brothers and boyfriends were sent as part of their military service. (2) Ractliffe contends that she knew little about it [Angola], beyond the war; hence her mythopoeic thought seems warranted. (2) It around the mid-1980s, however, that Ractliffe's fabled thoughts (and agency) slowly began to take shape upon her reading of Another Day of Life (1976), Ryszard Kapuscinski's account of the Portuguese retreat in Angola following the overthrow of the colonial system in 1975. In her letters dating back to November 2007 with Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, Ractliffe shared that she moved by how the Angolan resistance against the Portuguese empire part and parcel of being in southwestern Africa (4); for Ractliffe there a phenomenological semblance whereby the Angolan struggle for independence mirrored South Africa under apartheid governance. (5) This epiphany of sorts set into effect a desire to unpack these myths around the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002) and related military entanglements known in South Africa as the Border Wars (1966-89). What resulted were three photographic series: Terreno Ocupado (2007-08), As Terms do Fim do Mundo (2009-10), and The Borderlands (2011-13). These three bodies of work are the focus of The Aftermath of Conflict: Jo Ractliffe's Photographs of Angola and South Africa at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (August 24, 2015-March 6, 2016). While the curators of the exhibition--Dr. Yaelle Biro and Dr. Evelyn Owen--focused on the conflict and controversy burdening these landscapes, it might be far more prescient to consider their underbelly. That is, what if these traumatized landscapes were more than the Western ideologies and unforgiving histories that left economies vapid and servicemen adrift? The Aftermath of Conflict harbors a noteworthy paradox that coalesces with Susan Sontag and her writings on the photograph as implicitly magical and an attempt to contact or lay claim to another reality. (6) There is no doubt that the photographs in the exhibition reflect a reality in which landscape stands in for conflict. Yet Ractliffe arrived at this concern for landscape, war, and dispossession through myth. If we follow this logic alongside Sontag's observations on photography, we would be remiss not to consider Ractliffe's foreignness (7) in these landscapes. This however, goes beyond phenotypic cues, with the artist's racialization being rooted in a cultural divergence from Angola. Even in speaking about the construction of her foreignness, Ractliffe meditates on how the mythical narrative around past, present, and future distinguishes her from the people of Angola. …