Writtenscape - SOLD
Ben Coutouvidis (b 1970)
Writtenscape
Pen & ink
46 x 58 cm
Sold - 2010
My ‘written landscape’ is also about sieves and memory, it is an attempt to superimpose different sieves in order to capture enough “stuff” to reconstitute the land as an image. The drawing utilises different accounts by different people traveling through the South African landscape, including Deneys Reitz’s On Commando, which was his account of his experiences in the Anglo-Boer war, and Adulphe Delegorgue’s travels as a natural historian/scientist. Each writer tried to name the landscape in a different way. The particular passage that I used from On Commando tells of an incident that happened near Prince Albert when the Boer commando, traveling at night on horseback, rode into an on-coming British mounted column. In the darkness and confusion, “no-one said a word”, as their language would identify them and could mean being shot at. This is a wonderful synecdoche for that war, when what was at stake was the right to define one-self on one’s own terms.
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