Liliesleaf Farm Mayibuye: In Search of the Spectres of History

‘How accurately must one hear in order to hear the geometry of echoes in an old, peculiarly experienced house?’
(Stiltoe in Bachelard)

‘Liliesleaf Farm Mayibuye: In Search of the Spectres of History’ considers the roles that personal and political histories play in opening up the narratives of a place. Liliesleaf Farm, located in Rivonia South Africa, was the headquarters of the military wing of the African National Congress, (‘Umkhonto we Sizwe’) in the early 1960s. Nelson Mandela lived at Liliesleaf under the alias of David Motsamayi (a farmhand and gardener) and underground ANC activists’ meetings regularly took place at the farm. ‘Operation Mayibuye’ was an undercover campaign of sabotage intended to bring down the apartheid government, but a police raid on the farm (1963) and the notorious Rivonia Trial (1964) resulted in the lifetime imprisonment of anti-apartheid activists like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. Ideas for the film originated with 8mm film footage and photographs of my immigrant family at Liliesleaf. My German and Hungarian parents had recently moved from the Congo to settle in South Africa and Liliesleaf became our family home for a short time in the late 1960s.

Experimentation with film materiality and content lie at the heart of this project which uses archival 8mm home-movie footage, documentary re-enactments and experimental photographic processes to open up narratives for the intersecting histories. The home-movie footage was blown-up to 16mm on an Optical Printer at no.w.here lab (London) and negative/print filmstock was hand-processed, exposing the film’s materiality. The soundtrack was composed by Australian singer/songwriter, Emily Barker. Photographs taken at Liliesleaf Museum and the surrounding bushveld terrain of Johannesburg exist as cyanotype and Van Dyke photographic prints. The short film ‘Liliesleaf Farm Mayibuye: In Search of the Spectres of History’ was screened as part of
the Official ‘Experimenta’ selection at the 2016 BFI Film Festival.

This project was supported by Arts Council England and residencies at the Hosking Houses Trust (UK) and the Nirox Foundation (South Africa).

L-R Liliesleaf: layers of history #1 (detail) Van Dyke print; Liliesleaf Farm Mayibuye, 16mm film; Liliesleaf – layers of history #2 (detail) Van Dyke prin