Department of Visual Arts

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Browsing Department of Visual Arts by Author "Barnard, Desre"

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    'The horror without object' : a philosophical enquiry into photography, archives, and absence in Project Coast
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Barnard, Desre; Viljoen, Stella; Smith, Kathryn; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Following the 1997 arrest of Wouter Basson, South Africans watched in horror how the TRC began to unravel one of apartheid South Africa’s most sordid secrets: Project Coast, South Africa’s chemical and biological warfare programme. Although a surprising number of documents survived the various archival purges, there is a conspicuous lack of photographs pertaining directly to the project. Thus, envisioning what the project would have looked like falls largely into the realm of the imaginary. In this study, I consider the work of photographs in the service of the archive. By situating Project Coast within the visual economies of similar clandestine international CBW programmes, I argue that the lack of photographic evidence speaks to an ideology of absence, and secrecy as ideological. In the first section, I address the pictures that we do have from private and public archives in the form of news media reports and the narrativised account of Basson’s criminal trial, Secrets and Lies: Wouter Basson and South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme (Burger & Gould, 2002). As supplements and placeholders, those photographs which we do have fail to make present the largely fragmented project. However, I argue that this is not tantamount to the failure of the visual. In the second section, I examine the South African History Archive’s CBW Project Collection, AL2922, and begin to tease out how to recognise absence. By thinking of the absences as productive spaces, accessible by considering them as a Thirdspace (Soja, 1996), and engaging with them by seeing a-visually, I argue that the layers of secrecy can be able to be peeled back, leaving the absences that haunt the archive as potentially affective spaces. The absences in the archive have implications for trauma studies and nation-building, and as such, could be considered as imagined documents wherein we are able to project an image of what Project Coast may have looked like. The absences are far reaching, and exist not only in this archive. As such, I posit that by considering these absences as ‘sites’ worthy of critical engagement, we are able to think anew about how the secrecy of apartheid continues to haunt post-apartheid archives.