Retrotopia: “Secretly I Will Love You More”

‘This lecture juxtaposes two contemporary South African works, a landscape photograph by David Goldblatt and a video work by Andrew Putter. Each looks back at the putative ‘founding moment’ of South Africa’s history of segregation and sequestration, the 1650s, when the first Dutch settlers arrived at the Cape. But while the one is documentary and declarative, the other is dreamy and desiring. The lecture contrasts two modes of looking back in order to imagine a future that might have been and a past that could still be invented. ‘