Living and Representing ‘The Distance Within’

Namibian-born artist and author Nicola Brandt is launching ‘The Distance Within’ in Windhoek.

This large-scale coffee table book was published by Steidl Verlag in Germany. It achieves something extraordinary: a collection of beautiful, aesthetically astounding images that consider the artist’s Namibian belonging and German inheritance.

‘The Distance Within’ interrogates the complex relationship between German and Namibian colonial histories by moving between the public, the structural and the intimate.

The photographs and video stills from Brandt’s artwork over the past 15 years reveal the entangled pasts and presents of colonialism that continue to ensnare Namibian lives and landscapes. She juxtaposes her art practice with archival material, including photographs from her own family’s archive and those collected from different archival collections.

Brandt blends the realms of the witness and the artist in reckoning with the atrocities committed during the German and the South African colonial pasts. She touches on critical questions of memory-making: who can make our past, and what kind of memory can be open to the future?

Some highlights stood out for me while paging through this beautifully designed volume, taking in the stunning photography and reading the insightful essays by eminent Namibian, southern African and international scholars, art critics and artists.

The empty land: Landscape and the land question

Brandt revisits central and southern Namibian landscapes. Littered by ruins of colonisation and industrialisation, her images visualise land ownership, dispossession and dispersion.

In the arts, landscape painting as a historically white genre has represented the ‘empty lands’ in colonial artworks in Namibia and elsewhere in southern Africa, characteristically depicting the land as empty and pure, awaiting occupation by the chosen people.

The Namibian tourism industry continues to lure visitors to ‘the land of wide-open spaces’, “a land where you can look from horizon to horizon and see no sign of human interference”, as art historian Zamansele Nsele cites one website.

The settler colonial fiction of the empty landscapes waiting for the taking incarnates the legal jargon notion of ‘terra nullius’ meaning ‘land belonging to nobody’.

This mirrors common historical narratives told and taught in settler colonial societies – ideologies peddled to justify and legitimise the dispossession, dispersal and oppression of the allegedly non-existent indigenous population.

‘Landnahme’ (land grab) remains a central legacy of coloniality in Namibia. Generational pain, colonial injustice and the land question irrevocably underpin the representational engagement.

Brandt’s visual reflection on these histories of conquest, materiality and the arts is acutely memorable where the intimate meets the structural in dress, bodies and homes. Powerful images depict people and, most particularly, the proud presence of Herero women in their evocative Victorian-inspired ‘long dress’, notably close to the graves of genocide victims on the coast.

Brandt’s photographs create a visual counterbalance to the colonial legacy of land dispossession with this tradition appropriated from the colonisation of women’s power, beauty and embodiment.

Queering heritage: Intersectional activism

The legacy of colonisation and genocide in Namibia is not entirely symbolic. Nor can decolonial art practice remain symbolic only.

Rooted in Namibia’s colonial histories, socio-economic and gendered inequalities are real and devastating. These pose demanding challenges of moving beyond guilt and complicity for a white woman artist in southern Africa.

In November 2022 the statue of German colonial officer Curt von François in Windhoek was removed following two years of vigorous campaigning by memory activists. On that day, two young artists of OvaHerero descent, Muningandu Hoveka and Gift Uzera, together with Brandt, performed and recorded a jointly curated intervention at the site of the contested monument, which they named ‘Man of War: Leave My House’.

‘The Distance Within’ contains images of Hoveka and Uzera standing on the plinth of the monument, raising their hands to the sky with their backs turned to the statue. It also unlocks the view on Uzera dancing in celebration as the crane lifts the wrapped colonial statue.

In an essay published in the book, Hoveka and Uzera express their desire to (re)connect with their traditions and histories, which were destroyed during violent colonial conquest and rule, by translating their culture and rituals into new practices and identities.

As young artists in Namibia, they write: “We are listening and creating new stories and yet wish to nurture our ancestral mythologies and traditions. We are here and we will continue to create our own embodied future archives.” Their work exemplifies future-oriented memory work with the aim of an inclusive post-colonial Namibian society.

Brandt dedicates ‘The Distance Within’ to Namibian “intersectional activists past and present whose efforts embody decoloniality”.

From the position of her own complicated Namibian-German ancestry, she embarks on a pursuit of solidarity beyond guilt that emerges from hopes to contest injustice, while being aware of the complexity and unevenness of relations of power.

The artist’s thoughtful reflections about positionality and allyship as a white, female artist working in the post-apartheid era and resisting colonial amnesia, explore these challenges.

Brandt’s aesthetic and political sense embrace her inheritance of a regime of domination, which she, as a Namibian of German and South African descent, continues to occupy and from which she continues to benefit: histories and structures of racial privilege and white supremacy.

Her perceptive understanding of her implicated subject position (as conceptualised by the prominent holocaust and memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg) translates into an ambivalent sense of belonging and self-critique.

She writes: “In the space of embodied performance … co-creating and co-authoring became a form of reconciliation and friendship.” With this beautiful and insightful new book, Brandt demonstrates possibilities of new solidarities, allyship and productive collaborations.

An extended review of ‘The Distance Within’ is forthcoming in ‘Acta Germanica: German Studies in Africa’, Vol. 53, (December) 2025.

– Heike Becker, University of the Western Cape (hbecker@uwc.ac.za)

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