Ozombanda

2007

Mixed Media

David Jacobson: “The next is the “Ozombanda”. Here the importance of the rocks may be revealed during the course of people looking at this. I’m actually a stone carver; I’m a sculptor by profession. I work with stone and often with water, and so whether or not both the stone and water, is it because of the lack of water and the abundance of stone in Namibia I don’t know, but it’s what I do work with today. In this particular image I wanted to abstract the landscape quite a lot. Because very often the tarmac in Namibia melts when it gets so hot. And I was always intrigued why the white lines in the road never melted. And I had an opportunity to melt them myself in this particular one – because it never seems to happen, and the road becomes the river, tar becomes liquid again. And there’s actually a sort of vaguely pornographic image on this as well; it’s a friend of mine who posed for photographs with a photograph of Witbooi, but they’ve been overlaid, so you can’t tell, and once again it’s this idea of the memory – what do we remember, how accurately do we remember things. And the blinding light that you have, which to me was very, very important, because you can drive in Namibia and you really can feel as if someone is asking you questions, you know it’s like “Where are you going?”