Full Description
For the last three years, Richard Mosse has been working in eastern Congo, a region beset by ongoing cycles of conflict and factional violence. His depictions of the region and its inhabit - ants operate within the uneasy interstices of documentation, fiction, and hallucination. The Enclave presents an imaginary spacea conflation of many discrete rebel territories into one fictive, isolated destination; a space in which logic and time have become unhinged. Mosses landscapes and environmental portraits are rendered surreal in part through his use of discontinued military surveillance film, which registers an otherwise invisible spectrum of infrared light in vivid hues of fuchsia and lavender. The images are seductive, alluring. Ultimately, however, they serve to map the otherwise invisible edges of violence, chaos, and uncommunicable horror. The Enclave is also a space in which communities starve despite inhabiting the worlds most fertile and resource-laden landscapes.
Within this space, massacre follows massacre; young children are brutalized and forced into military service; friends turn out to be enemies; and women are routinely raped before being slaughtered in front of their families. Eyewitness accounts of these acts, collected and transcribed by Human Rights Watch, are included in the pages of this volume, in stark contrast to the - real landscapes. With this disorienting mix of fact and the fantastical, The Enclave book and the five-screen multimedia installation it accompanies, to be presented at the Venice Biennalehijacks the traditional narratives of war photography and humanitarianism, plunging the viewer directly into the ambiguities that are actively redefining the project of both documentation and geo-political intervention.
