✨FEDERICA ANGELUCCI’s FINDINGS And the second photographer selected by my guest Federica Angelucci, co-director of @stevenson_za gallery, is Jo Ractliffe (@joractliffe). Enjoy her great work! “The Borderlands is the third chapter of Jo Ractliffe’s ongoing series started in 2007 on the aftermath of the war in Angola (1975-2002). This series looks at three sites within South Africa that were utilised by the South African Defence Force during the mobilisation of the war: Riemvasmaak, Schmidtsdrift and Pomfret. These places also share previous histories of violence and dispossession during the colonial and apartheid eras. At the end of the war, Angolan soldiers who had been recruited by the South African military and who could not return to their home country were relocated there with their families, where they live in a precarious relationship with local communities and the state. The border is by definition a place of crossings, where different groups, interests and stories collide and intertwine. Ractliffe looks at this landscape, firmly located within South Africa, yet with a nature of its own, a repository of memory made of details and expansive emptiness. The communities based in these places inhabit a world both familiar and foreign. To my eye the impossibility of returning home is the distinctive undercurrent of the series.”