Good Hope
Carla Liesching
MACK
English
Softcover
192 pages
155 x 205 mm
2021
ISBN 9781913620424
In Good Hope, Carla Liesching constructs a fragmented visual and textual assemblage that orbits around the gardens and grounds at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa — a historic location at the height of Empire, now an epicenter for anti-colonial resistance movements, and also the place of the artist’s birth. Named by the Portuguese in their ‘Age of Discovery’, the Cape’s position at the mid-point along the ‘Spice Route’ was viewed with great optimism for its potential to open up a valuable maritime passageway. The ‘refreshment station’ later established there set into motion flows of capital from ‘east’ to ‘west’. Good Hope brings together cumulative layers of documentary prose, personal essay, and found photographic material, along with sources ranging from apartheid-era trade journals, tourist pamphlets, and National Geographic and Life magazines, to contemporary newspapers and family albums. It offers both an intimate and critical examination of White supremacist settler-colonialism in the present, and a questioning of the ethics and politics involved in the very acts of looking, discovering, collecting, codifying, preserving, naming, knowing, and putting to language.
(source: https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/good-hope-br-carla-liesching)
About the Artist
Carla Liesching is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, writing, collage, sculpture, installation, bookmaking and design. Grounded in early experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, her work considers the intersections of representation, knowledge and power—with a focus on colonial histories and enduring constructions of race and geography. As part of her socially engaged practice, Carla is also a youth educator focused on photography, visual literacy and self-publishing as vehicles for expression and empowerment. She is an avid self-publisher and is a contributing editor and co-founder of femme-centered quarterly publication Puzzazz Mag.
carlaliesching.com
(source: http://www.carlaliesching.com/info)
About the Publisher
MACK is an independent art and photography publishing house based in London. Mack works with established and emerging artists, writers and curators, and cultural institutions, releasing between 20-25 books per year. The publisher was founded in 2010 in London by Michael Mack.
mackbooks.co.uk
(source: https://mackbooks.co.uk/pages/about-us)
