An ordinary area, an ordinary road between Betty's Bay and the Cape Town in South Africa captured in photographs - this is the one way describing the Parrot Jungle, project of the respected African artist Lien Botha. For Lien it has been already ninth exhibition act involving total 45 deeply personal pictures of his daily surroundings. Each photograph somehow bears the burden of decomposition of the world, which, as the author says, remembers the birds' singing. It is a serious appeal which is even intensified by the raw shots aesthetics, which all can be found in precisely caught details hidden under the mask of day-to-day life.
Parrot Jungle 2009
The road goes nowhere really. I perceived it to have a beginning in Betty's Bay with an estimated half-way at the Cymbiflora Parrot sign and finally ending in the area of the Company Gardens, Cape Town. But this is not quite the way of my particular road map. It was meant to be a drive-by revisited; at last being able to return to some of the fugitive sites which were lost when I was on my way to a shoot or something else. Always something else: in lieu of the thing you actually want to do. This time I was going to return. And in returning the detours emerged because one had a certain sense of deliverance, an undesignated destination. For all the drive times when Roger Waters drowned bad news from the broadcaster or for the times when the rain would make the road invisible, or for the roadkill I couldn't face or for the pedestrians walking, wondering where to, and the stray dogs and the fragile site hut before it disappeared into the road we may soon be travelling on...
It more or less circumnavigates the route I have come to know, punctuated by particular individuals who have a resonance personally or strategically. Helene Lambert's Histoire des Jardins survived the Congo and Lebo Diale was my last tenant in St Martini Gardens.
