In our Hands – Joshua Craze and Wolf Böwig | BLP for Mouse Magazine
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You sent me four images for my trip, and I thought of them like charms, meant to keep me safe. I was to go to Juba and then head to the South Sudanese border with Darfur, before plunging into the war that raged to the north. On the plane from Nairobi to South Sudan’s capital, I kept staring at your images on my laptop screen, as if I were a detective investigating a crime scene. There were two collages and two photographic polyptychs. What hidden logic led you to send me these pictures, and not others? I closed my laptop before the plane banked down over the Nile; the internal relationship between the images, still mysterious to me.
I arrived in Juba on Valentine’s Day, to be greeted by a public letter from a leading South Sudanese politician, accusing me of being in the pay of the rebels. As a precaution, I spent the night at my hotel, and looked, once again, at your images, which transported me through time. I suddenly remembered the sadness of a demobilized Mende militia fighter sitting disconsolately in his carpentry workshop, surrounded by garbage. Soon, other memories emerged. Of scholars trapped in the binary brutality of the war on terror. Of sorcery and spells, proven and alleged. Of violence, abstract, and all too concrete.
The next day, the poisoned letter was followed by a front-page denunciation in a newspaper run by the National Security Service. Then the surveillance started. I had to cut my trip short, and never got to Darfur, but I travelled nonetheless. Sat in my hotel room, I tried to work out the plot against me. Was there a real threat? How far up did this go? Was I simply being paranoid? Lying awake at night, I mapped cartographies of potential violence: the checkpoints on the way out of the city, the quickest way to the border, the desolate stretches of road on the way there. By 4am, I needed to get out of my head, and so looked once again at what you had sent me. Through your images, I went to other borders and other times. Your pictures helped me make a different sort of map. An escape route.
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