Pieter Hugo - Permanent Error

When a computer game, a website, or a spreadsheet becomes obsolete, it tends, in a way, to split in two: on the one hand there is the “real” file or database, the one that we maneuver through or tinker with on the screen, and on the other there is the object, the disk or the piece of hardware that encloses it.  The first can easily vanish without a trace (if it isn’t mechanically mothballed by the Internet Archive or another website-preservation outfit), while the latter lingers on as slowly decomposing junk, spent evidence now free to be channeled across the globe for whatever use it may serve.  Most often it moves from a developed to an undeveloped country, perhaps even roughly back to where it was manufactured.  A peculiar, unsavory circle closes, from basic subsistence, through comfort and advancement, then back to subsistence again.  It is the raw factuality of this unsavoriness that Pieter Hugo documents in his exhibition of photographs, entitled Permanent Error.

The location is a dump on the fringes of Accra, one of the largest cities in West Africa; it serves as a nightmarish version of a data center, with clouds of plastic fumes in place of any service or transmission.  The hardware and software are incidentals in the retrieval of metal wires and other metallic bits of material, to be carried or carted off to communities nearby.

Judging from the photographs, the bulk of the work is done by young men, most seemingly in their teens or twenties, who dig through the heaps with long picks or with their hands.  One wipes his eyes, probably affected by the noxious smoke that fills the air.  A lone woman stares pensively at the viewer, a shiny metal bowl hinting at everyone’s justification for lingering around this empty landscape of dirt and white plastic.  Though, as the titles of each work remind us, this place is technically a market, hardly any signs of trading or interaction can be seen; even in the two or three group photos the men generally focus on the ground before them, absorbed in their task.  Whether this is due to the photographer’s staging—clearly there is some, as in every picture there is at least one figure posing, unsmiling, for the camera—or the reality of the situation, it clearly expresses the unpleasantness and solitariness of the task.

Formally, the photographs possess a striking, though barren, beauty, with the occasionally rich colors of the figures pairing off elegantly against the dark, vacant landscape.  The rising smoke would be enough by itself to draw the eye’s attention, in the absence of any portraiture, but the two in combination help to create the double effect of identification and alienation that, theoretically at least, carries across to the actual experience of the workers.  The fire and smoke also make one aware of the images of international war that lurk on the horizon, yet another exportable commodity with its own particular varieties of detritus.  As the narrator states in one of Harun Farocki’s recent films: “Like our commodities, most of our wars, these days, are made in the third world.”  It is only natural, then, that the pursuit of a means of survival in these places should become a form of low-level, self-inflicted chemical warfare.