00:00:00: So, you know, it is quite sad to see how many decades later these wounds run incredibly deep and the need, you know, the very strong need for restitution and reparations which have been going on now for several decades and they've only been getting louder over the last, say, two decades or two or three decades.

00:00:42: Hamburg Arts is a podcast with topics and stories from the art world.

00:00:47: And I am Kai Detlefs, journalist in Hamburg.

00:00:58: This is the first episode of my conversation with Nikola Brandt, a remarkable artist and photographer from Namibia.

00:01:07: In Namibia they grew up with German ancestors, so a rather unusual life story and a rather unusual vita.

00:01:17: Namibia, in turn, is a former German colony, namely German South-West Africa.

00:01:23: This colonial period was occupied by Nicola Brandt until today, in her work and in her photographs and books.

00:01:31: The colonial period means that we are also talking about the death of the German people, starting with the Herero and Nama.

00:01:38: This death of the people has been followed until today.

00:01:41: And therefore, Nicola Brandt is occupied.

00:01:45: She now has a book published titled The Distance Within, with photographs and texts to this topic.

00:01:53: The book was published by Steide Verlag in Göttingen.

00:01:55: And Nicolas Brandt researched the book here in Hamburg in the Mark Museum, the museum for people.

00:02:03: There she has published numerous documents from the time of the colonial era.

00:02:08: Today!

00:02:09: But this conversation between you and me is being held remotely, as you say.

00:02:15: So I'm sitting in Hamburg and Nikola is sitting in this case in Kapstadt, in South Africa.

00:02:39: Teenagers were spent in the capital of Namibia.

00:02:43: However, my ancestors, both from my South African and German side, were farm owners.

00:02:53: Occasionally, I would visit my great-grandparent's farm, which was called Corona.

00:03:00: That was in the trans number.

00:03:01: From my mother's side, they were actually South African farm owners that eventually migrated, I believe, in the early up to Namibia and they settled in the Trans Namib.

00:03:14: My upbringing was largely in a middle class, middle upper class environment.

00:03:20: It was a quite a distinct separation at that point because I was born in the nineteen eighties which was still the era of apartheid between Namibians of color and you know communities or suburbs which were largely white.

00:03:36: And you know as I was.

00:03:37: you know you know, Kela said, excellent of nature as to where you were born.

00:03:41: I wasn't as a child fully aware or understood these, you know, these very, in a sense, forced, forced separations from a ideological point of view.

00:03:56: But as I grew up, I started to question them.

00:03:59: This brings me to my next question.

00:04:01: How was it being a teenager to grow up doing this apartheid?

00:04:06: You know, what is interesting is, again, the normalization of a system.

00:04:14: So if you're born into a system and as you know from your childhood, it's quite hard to understand that this might not be a healthy environment, not be a conducive environment for many others.

00:04:37: So I think As I said earlier, I was born in the nineteen eighties and there was a lot of political upheaval during that time because it was when the liberation struggle was coming to a head in that period.

00:04:51: So there were ruptures in one's daily life, but they were large and small and my parents who wanted to protect myself, my two brothers from encountering too many of those dissonances or those moments of violence.

00:05:07: attempted to keep us quite sheltered, but nevertheless, around the household table, around the lunch table, there would be discussions as to what was happening in the country and the political turmoil in the country.

00:05:19: So as a child, I might have not fully grasped it, but there certainly was this feeling of, you can argue, onheimlichkeit and a dissonance in the everyday.

00:05:32: So did you have ever friends in the black community?

00:05:35: So I did because I actually, the two schools that I went to in St.

00:05:43: George's and St.

00:05:44: Paul's, there are two relatively renowned schools in the capital.

00:05:52: I luckily had the exposure on a daily basis to Namibians of different backgrounds.

00:05:58: There was a lot of.

00:06:00: arguably, there was also tension because those young children were carrying the impact or so the trauma of what their parents and their ancestors have gone through.

00:06:13: And yet perhaps they couldn't fully express it in the right terms.

00:06:18: So I did feel a certain tension in our, in daily exchanges that perhaps we're not fully understood as young girls and boys or teenagers, but it was certainly there.

00:06:34: And yet I think I was lucky to have that exposure.

00:06:40: Whereas, you know, there were other schools, even I would argue that the German school that was at that point more homogenous, so primarily the millions of German ancestry later would become more mixed.

00:06:52: But the two schools that I attended were certainly, you know, were certainly less homogenous, or ever still quite privileged.

00:07:02: So you were talking about this tension.

00:07:05: the tension between black and white people.

00:07:07: So I would like to know more about this, what you call tension between white people and people of color.

00:07:15: Well, it's quite obvious.

00:07:17: I mean, the liberation struggle, you can trace all the way back to almost her rival of the Germans and the Rhine missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century.

00:07:25: And there were many decades of different permutations of that liberation struggle, too.

00:07:34: challenge and pushback on the presence of colonial settlers.

00:07:38: And so I think what my work and as my work as an artist tries to do and also thinking about where my origins, my background is to actually look at those entanglements across the period of German colonialism into apartheid and even into the post-apartheid years.

00:08:02: My immediate peers as a child and as a teenager, they carried a kind of subconscious anger in some instances or a feeling of injustice and that would certainly break out in the most unexpected occasions.

00:08:26: They were fraught years in the nineteen eighties and I always say, I might no longer be in the nineteen eighties.

00:08:34: those years certainly remain in me and have shaped my thinking from that period onwards.

00:08:45: Again, it was very subtle.

00:08:48: My parents weren't overt activists.

00:08:51: They were attempting to in a sense protect the children as much as possible or their family, but I do sometimes question the fact that they were perhaps not even more actively involved in dismantling a very problematic regime, which was the apartheid regime, that Namibia was also falling under right up until nineteen ninety.

00:09:13: And so did you talk with any other white people about this topic?

00:09:17: Did you engage with other people or were you on your

00:09:20: own?

00:09:21: I think like in most communities, you know, you do have individuals that are willing to take a more overt activist stance and to speak up and to stick their neck out and to say, no, this is not her.

00:09:40: The system is deeply problematic.

00:09:44: It's inhumane.

00:09:46: So there were those individuals, but the majority would just get on with the day-to-day.

00:09:55: You know, the idea of... Also, many people, especially Namibians of European ancestry, benefited from the apartheid system.

00:10:09: So questioning it directly was often suppressed.

00:10:17: However, there were certainly key aspects.

00:10:21: My father was an architect and he worked for a period with an activist that was very much at the forefront of trying to dismantle the system And he really took great risks in a fraught time.

00:10:42: And when did you actually engage with this topic of colonialism?

00:10:46: at which stage in your life?

00:10:48: What kind of moment was this?

00:10:53: I think it was more of a subconscious process that emerged over growing up in this region.

00:11:02: I think where it became more conscious was perhaps when I actually left Namibia for boarding school, I attended boarding school in South Africa.

00:11:14: And I think with a little bit of distance and with the conversations here about, because I'm currently based in South Africa at the moment, it gave me a different perspective on my own country because I had a little bit more of this critical distance.

00:11:30: So during my years in boarding school, I started to ask more direct questions about, you know, where I come from, what does it mean to be of this background?

00:11:43: And then I think in my twenties, that's when things got more, if you call it more clear or more focused.

00:11:55: I think they were spurred by one or two very challenging conversations that I had with individuals in my immediate community, friends and also family.

00:12:07: And then also a big debate around the removal of a particular monument, which is called the Reiter Denkbaum in the capital of Vintog.

00:12:15: And I think that was when I really had a turning point of saying, look, I have a sense of responsibility that I need to actually make this a part of my life's work.

00:12:28: Let's talk about your book, The Distance Within.

00:12:31: Your photography shows landscapes, but these landscapes of Namibia are not the typical tourist point of view.

00:12:39: This is not the romantic view of landscape.

00:12:42: You even speak about your non-landscapes.

00:12:46: So what is your attempt?

00:12:48: I mean, in some sense, it's an attempt to make non-landscapes, but one can never really escape.

00:12:56: the landscape view.

00:12:57: So my background is, yes, I was born and raised in Namibia, but I also have this European background.

00:13:04: So the field of landscape, as we know, is very much of a Eurocentric concept.

00:13:11: And I think when I think it, you know, if you look at the aesthetic field of landscape, it has its origins.

00:13:21: If you go back even into sort of Dutch painting or Flemish painting.

00:13:27: it really became a genre, whereas it was not necessarily a genre in the region of Southern Africa, although landscape is something which one inhabits in a very mistral way.

00:13:46: I think for me, I was also exposed in households that I grew up in.

00:13:54: a lot of these landscape views.

00:13:56: and yet they were often quite seemingly benign and innocent.

00:14:01: And I would later also come to see that this aesthetic conditioning also reflected a certain value system.

00:14:11: So the idea that these wide open endless spaces that are uninhabited or unpeopled also spoke to a kind of psychological or spiritual claiming of the land.

00:14:24: Not in all cases, I think.

00:14:25: sometimes artists would just do it in a very arguably, quote unquote, innocent manner when they painted the landscape or they drew it.

00:14:35: But there was a certain romanticization about these wide open spaces.

00:14:41: And later I would start to question.

00:14:44: actually, well, you know, what are they trying to capture?

00:14:47: And I think as I mentioned, there was a kind of a a psychic claiming in some instances, but also showing views that didn't necessarily reveal the particular traumas or the invisible monuments that were actually in those views.

00:15:10: So I think in the end, my journey with this concept of landscape became one of trying to interrogate that, trying to interrogate these pictorial and romantic views of whiteness.

00:15:26: You just mentioned the expression of trauma.

00:15:28: So in how far is trauma connected to landscapes?

00:15:34: Well, I don't think it's the first time, it's certainly not the first time that trauma and landscape have been placed in some sort of a dialogue.

00:15:45: I mean, I think looking at, for example, the work of Santamufragen and South African documentary photographer.

00:15:56: He, at the sort of the dawn of the post-apartite era in four nineteen ninety-five, he traveled through South Africa and even came up to Namibia with his camera.

00:16:09: And he visited a number of sites of trauma and he tried to capture it with his camera.

00:16:15: But even if you go back to the work of writer and filmmaker such as Claude Lansman and his work, Stowe, he's certainly engaged with the idea of trauma and landscape and that the land holds a certain kind of memory or even layers of memory and looking for those clues, those marks, those scars and traces in the land that might reveal some of these traumas.

00:16:43: So I don't think it's certainly not a novel approach, but I think from my positionality, my background and the sights that I looked at, I think I certainly try to show something, try to show a different angle on my country.

00:17:00: And for those who would engage with my work and also travel through Namibia, we perhaps have, in a sense, more open eyes to think about these dramatic views that they are encountering, because the landscape leans in in Namibia wherever you go.

00:17:22: They're these vast... spaces, not wherever you go, but certainly if you travel through down to the south and the fact that it is one of the least populated countries in the world, you really do have the sense of these so-called dramatic wide open spaces.

00:17:40: But I wanted a different kind of engagement with them.

00:17:44: And so through photography and video, I tried in a very subtle way to to disrupt those landscapes and turn them into something else that would leave a perhaps a kind of a sense of discomfort or ambivalence in the eye of a viewer.

00:18:03: Yes, all these landscapes seem to be abandoned.

00:18:07: There's this certain emptiness in these landscapes.

00:18:10: and well, this is your view of Namibian landscape, right?

00:18:18: The landscapes are quite empty when you travel through them.

00:18:22: One of the oldest, the movie has one of the oldest deserts in the world.

00:18:27: There it is in many places, especially in the more dry region in the south, are terribly populated.

00:18:35: However, key historical events actually played out in those wide open spaces.

00:18:43: And those historical events, those atrocities, those wars, those battles, those skirmishes often go unmarked and I had the privilege of actually traveling with two women to a rarer woman who took me on a journey into their Namibia and they actually started to point out sights in the landscape that I would have probably not seen as a Namibian of a different background where particular battles or burial sites were.

00:19:23: and in a sense they, you know, they opened my eyes to these two very different engagement with these wide open spaces.

00:19:36: And that became a very, you know, one of the key themes in my book.

00:19:40: You were saying these Herero women were showing you their Namibia.

00:19:46: So you didn't know their Namibia.

00:19:50: So where's the difference between these two views of Namibia?

00:19:57: Well, I think that's it.

00:20:01: Again, one can't be too binary about this.

00:20:04: There are obviously overlaps.

00:20:06: I mean, we do share aspects of the experience of plays, but then also just very different perspectives.

00:20:15: So there's a kind of overlap, but also a differentiation.

00:20:19: I think, for example, Katowanga, she took me to her homestead, which was about an hour and a half or two hours outside of the capital.

00:20:34: And as we were traveling, she pointed out a particular mountain, which was nicknamed the Kaiser Wilhelm Mountain by the Germans.

00:20:43: And she said, look, that's the names the Germans gave to this mountain.

00:20:47: But this is also a mountain where we stop and we commemorate those who fell in one of the first battles or the first attempts to rise up against the presence of the German colonialists.

00:20:59: And this mountain is sacred to us.

00:21:01: And she showed me the spot where she often, when she drives back to her homestead to visit a family, she gets out of the car and she actually honors her ancestors that fought in the war and also died in the war.

00:21:14: That also forms, you'll see that's the cover of my book, The Distance Within.

00:21:20: You see Catavango actually gazing out over to the Kaiser Bethel Mountain.

00:21:25: And another example where we were driving to her home site of Vittorchal and she said, she asked me to stop the car and we climbed over a fence and she took me to a burial site of one of her ancestors.

00:21:42: And she pointed out that we were on private, basically private commercial farmland, but that the farm had been acquired after her ancestor being buried there.

00:21:57: And so she said she doesn't have immediate access.

00:21:59: She essentially has to, so-called almost trespass to visit the graves of her people.

00:22:08: So that was another moment of me seeing a very different type of, as I arguably, a different angle to the experience of place in my own country.

00:22:21: I think throughout the journey, it was almost becoming stranger in my own country.

00:22:27: I was aware to some extent, but it was just this unlayering or unpeeling of and developing a more nuanced gaze onto something which was supposedly familiar because I had grown up in this particular region.

00:22:43: What I find interesting and what strikes me is that for Herrero people, the colonial time is still so vivid and present for them, right?

00:22:52: Absolutely.

00:22:53: And I think there are various reasons for that because those particular events still have direct repercussions on how they live today.

00:23:09: And they still feel and it's very much a reality of the inequities of those events of the German colonial war and genocide and the displacement of Ireronama, San, Bushman and Damra that were in many cases forced off the land that they inhabited when the German colonists arrived and that land is still not accessible.

00:23:46: So that's one very clear repercussion that still reverberates today.

00:23:52: And then a huge inequity also on economic level where there's a frustration at feeling that they were also not only culturally and sympathically disenfranchised, but also very much on economic level.

00:24:13: So it is quite... sad to see how many decades later these wounds run incredibly deep and the need, you know, the very strong need for restitution and reparations which have been going on now for several decades and they've only been getting louder over the last say two decades or two or three decades.

00:24:42: So what were your feelings when talking with these herero women?

00:24:46: This is there.

00:24:48: view, their special view, looking back to the colonial time.

00:24:52: And now, did you know that there is still this trauma?

00:24:57: Absolutely.

00:24:57: I think the trauma has always been there.

00:25:01: And they've, you know, among them, among their own communities and even across tribal lines between the Herrera and the Nama and the Sun, there has been some dialogue around this incredible deep sense of injustice.

00:25:19: However, post-Ninety-Ninety, I think you can maybe even compare it to, you know, the wall coming down or Eastern Europe opening up, many more stories came to the fore.

00:25:33: And a lot of these frustrations and the sense of injustice became much more acute in the public realm and, you know, actually became louder.

00:25:48: It was a lot of newspaper articles, radio interviews, demonstrations, protests were held.

00:26:01: That sense of injustice and that sense of need for liberation and having, what would you call it, reparations.

00:26:13: but actually That has been with the Herrero since, you know, since the late nineteenth century, arguably even since the arrival of the German colonialists.

00:26:27: So it's nothing new.

00:26:28: It's not suddenly that out of the blue in the nineteen nineties, there was this kind of, you know, all these stories came out.

00:26:36: They were always there, but they became more visible and audible in the public realm.

00:26:43: I have to ask you this.

00:26:44: How did you actually plan this journey.

00:26:48: I mean, obviously you were going by car, yes, but how did you manage to go through the desert?

00:26:54: It sounds a little bit risky or adventurous, right?

00:26:59: I grew up in Namibia, so I was used to doing rather long trips with my father, with my parents.

00:27:10: Yes, it does require planning, it does require... having a robust vehicle that can get you from HB because a lot of it is actually not, you know, there's not the necessary infrastructure.

00:27:27: I, you know, it was, it was arguably also part of, I wouldn't, I don't want to use the word journey because that's very cliche, but I'm really experiencing the land, the kind of the the breadth and depth of the land over several years.

00:27:48: And I would travel sometimes alone, I would travel sometimes to Katavangua or Kukui Kui, sometimes I would travel to another companion.

00:27:57: And it would mean camping.

00:28:03: In many instances it would quote unquote be called wild camping, finding a site and actually setting up a tent or making a fire.

00:28:10: And then from there I would explore immediate environment.

00:28:17: But as I said, I had these incredible guides and they would actually show me sites that they felt were historically significant.

00:28:24: But that's also part of the reason why this project took so long was.

00:28:29: I traveled into the deep south of Namibia and then I also went across the Omaheke which is bordering Botswana and also going up to you know, some of the north, but also the area around Waterberg, which is where the famous battle and genocide between the Herrera and the German colonial forces occurred.

00:28:59: So, you know, I must have traveled to only thirty, forty thousand kilometers.

00:29:06: Also, as a woman, there was an element of precarity in doing in doing this type of work because you are out there and not only is there the risk of potential accidents on the road, on gravel, on untarred roads, but also it's not that one fears being eaten by a lion, because that has occurred.

00:29:36: It's also just physical safety.

00:29:38: So there was also that risk.

00:29:40: On the other hand, there's also a huge privilege to be able to keep using this word to be able to travel like that in Namibia because many Namibians, just because of also being economically disenfranchised, do not have access to the country in a way that they can just travel from A to B because, again, it's a question of resources.

00:30:07: So I was very lucky to be able to actually dedicate so much time to it.

00:30:13: And this came about, I was doing my doctorate and I also received funding from my doctorate, which allowed me to invest that into the project and into all of this research, this kind of really embedded research in place.

00:30:28: Nicolas, thanks for your time.

00:30:39: This was the first episode with the photographer and artist Nikola Brandt from Namibia.

00:30:45: Nikola Brandt grew up in Namibia as a daughter of German and British ancestors.

00:31:08: We continued the conversation and if you want to stay tuned, please subscribe to this channel.

00:31:32: My name is Kai Detlefs.

00:31:33: I live and work in Hamburg as a journalist.

00:31:34: Thank you for listening and I hope to see you again next time.