p i e t e r   h u g o
permanent error @ MAXXI
1st december 2011| 29th april 2012

MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome

curated by Francesca Fabiani

«Whenever we live, we must realize that when we sweep things out of our lives and throw them away ... they don't disappear as we might like to believe. We must know that "away" is in fact a place (...) where people and environments will suffer for our carelessness, our ignorance or indifference. "Away" is a place called Agbogbloshie.» These are the concluding words of a text by American environmentalist Jim Puckett, published in Pieter Hugo's book Permanent Error.
The text tackles the problem of toxic waste or, worse, the economic interests and illegality that lie behind this market, and invites us to wake up to the environmental, social, political and moral implications inherent in the thoughtless gesture of throwing "away". Implications which today more than ever, and also in Italy, are coming to light in all their seriousness.

Recent decades have brought about a new problem in terms of waste disposal: e-waste, meaning the more than 50 million tonnes of technological scrap that the West sends largely to third world countries as second hand goods. In theory they are supposed to bridge the digital gap, but they actually end up as mountainous heaps of useless rubbish.

Agbogbloshie, a shantytown on the outskirts of Accra (Ghana), is home to one of the world's biggest hi-tech dumps: computers, monitors, cables and motherboards are burnt here to obtain their copper, brass, aluminium and zinc for resale. This produces harmful residues that contaminate air, water and land. And people.

Agbogbloshie is the scenario of the latest work by South African photographer Pieter Hugo (b. Johannesburg 1976).
It is to him - and other photographers of the post-apartheid generation - that we owe a turnaround in the way of representing the African continent: he offers new and striking points of view in comparison with the stereotyped (but no less true) image to which we are sadly accustomed.

After a brief interlude as a photojournalist Hugo focused his attention on highly specific and marginal contexts of African reality, interested not so much in describing political and social dynamics (which remain implicit anyway) as in investigating the human condition of people who have to deal with such physical or existential contexts. The theme of identity and belonging is therefore a cornerstone of his research, which mainly translates into the choice of the portrait.

African albinos or poor white families in South Africa (shunned by both whites and blacks), the gatherers of wild honey dressed like superheroes, the Hyena-men, fearful troubadours who stroll around town with hyenas and baboons on a leash, the portraits of black magistrates who administer justice in a country where for years they suffered the injustice of whites, the workers in Agbogbloshie, diligently plying an invented trade that will kill them: the paradox always found in the situations Pieter Hugo shoots is manifested, without being resolved, in the space of a glance.

The extraordinary intensity of his portraits is a result of his ability to find a point of equilibrium between a series of contrasts taking place, without any attempt at straightening them out. His people are at once strong and vulnerable: they are immediately "likeable" and inspire unconditional respect because in them we recognise the greatness of the human spirit which, even under extreme conditions, finds the courage and pride to affirm its own identity. They are irresistibly attractive images that we can't take our eyes off, but at the same time frightening because they show something we're not wholly capable of facing. Their "harshness" is such that we need to approach them by degrees, like children watching a horror film who cover their eyes but leave a slit open so as not to miss the scene. Only the aesthetic filter - achieved  through formal rigour, compositional balance and refined use of colour - allows a (partial) sweetening of the asperity of the vision.
Interest in this friction between subject/context/identity has something to do with a biographical fact: having been born white in a country torn for years by apartheid must have carried some weight in Hugo's formation. Perhaps this is what lies behind his honesty and his attempt to understand the situations and people he meets and photographs. The portraits are never ‘stolen': the frontal pose and proud attitude reveal the subject's awareness of being photographed and therefore the wish to be seen, which frees us from any suspicion of invading a person's intimate life without authorisation. They do not ask for compassion, only recognizability.

His projects always grow out of a suggestion, a heartfelt detail seen or heard somewhere. And this work was no different: «the first time I heard of Agbogbloshie was in a National Geographic article about recycling. There was a very singular image of the dump. I knew right away I had to go there and do it.»
The locals have given the slum the nickname "Sodom and Gomorra" due to the thorough degradation to which its inhabitants are subjected. A catastrophic scenario whose title, as if it were necessary, includes a further admonition: «permanent error is computer jargon for "an error that occurs when a sector mark on the disk pack is incorrectly modified by writing data over it, and that can be corrected only by clearing the entire disk and rewriting the track and sector marks"». A shame that Planet Earth cannot be formatted.

Pieter Hugo worked at the dump on several occasions in 2009 and 2010, shooting the 54 photographs - portraits and group settings - that comprise the series.
In the ensemble scenes the figures wander about slowly among bonfires and heaps of computer detritus in an atmosphere between the bucolic and the infernal, while cows and oxen graze placidly among the toxic miasmas of the land. Like apparitions the portraits of Mohammed Musam, Abdulai Yahaya, Ibrahim Sulley and the others emerge from columns of dense smoke. Somewhat like saints, somewhat like demons, with electric wire haloes, eccentric garments and the attributes of saints whose iconography we don't recognise, they bring about a crisis in our ability to define them and consequently to define ourselves. As disturbing as a question mark that lacks even a question.
(Francesca Fabiani)