The territory investigated in Good Hope is contested between two opposing narratives. With Good Hope, the artist Carla Liesching compiles a wide-ranging visual and textual investigation that takes as its subject the troubled political, historical and identity narrative of the Cape of Good Hope, a rocky peninsula located in South Africa, in the Western Cape province that constitutes the southwestern extremity of the African continent.

On one hand there’s the memory of the colonial empire, and on the other the desire to emancipate oneself from this political and narrative dominance, opposing this identity with another voice and the concretisation of an epicentre for anti-colonial movements. This narrative ambivalence is a complexity that the author succeeds in interpreting and unravelling through direct knowledge of the various aspects of the place where she was born.

Proceeding through the collection of fragments, images and texts, Carla Liesching configures a visual research that offers the interlocutor a rich and varied panorama. A crossing of the landscape in which, through juxtapositions and readings, it is possible to discern the general character of a vision that is both attentive to the history of the place and at the same time profoundly poetic.

Using a method that does not disdain the generic characteristics of documentary prose, Liesching combines personal essays, found photographic material, together with the most disparate sources such as commercial newspapers from the apartheid era, tourist brochures, National Geographic and Life magazines, contemporary newspapers and family albums.

An accumulation of material that the author uses, formalising the language in order to create a posture capable of rendering both the semantic complexity of the object of her investigation and of producing, perhaps primarily for herself, a significant and critical questioning on the past and present history of white supremacist colonialism.

A question that, as an author, goes through and problematises the same artistic practice and her linguistic praxis for which the very act of looking, selecting, approaching and naming things to the point of making them become language and expression cannot but become, in this case more than ever, also an ethical and political gesture.