Portsmouth Open: Patti Gaal-Holmes

There are many questions about how we position ourselves within personal and political archives. About who has the right to claim a story as theirs. About how to tread carefully, respectfully or instead shatter all illusions and attempt to arrive at some kind of ‘truth’. All of these preoccupy me as I return to the ‘shared’ Liliesleaf house, forming both a central part of the South Africa liberation struggle and a latent space of early childhood memory in my subconscious. Somehow, I can’t let go of this project, although a feint line was drawn in the sand through situating both histories alongside each other in the film Liliesleaf Farm Mayibuye (2016, official selection BFI). Now the old family photographs, letters, archival documents, police records, films and notebooks are laid out again on the table to finally draw a conclusion on this (if this be possible). As proposed here this Liliesleaf ‘archive exists as a feedback loop’ to return to and lose myself in once again.

Liliesleaf Farm Mayibuye: Revisited considers the roles that personal and political histories play in opening up the narratives of a place. Liliesleaf Farm, located in Rivonia South Africa, was the headquarters of the military wing of the African National Congress, (‘Umkhonto we Sizwe') in the early 1960s. A police raid on the farm (1963) and the notorious Rivonia Trial (1964) resulted in the lifetime imprisonment of anti-apartheid activists like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. Ideas for the film originated with 8mm film footage and photographs of my immigrant family at Liliesleaf Farm as this was our home in the late 1960s. My German and Hungarian parents had recently moved from the Congo to settle in South Africa and Liliesleaf Farm became our family home for a short time in the late 1960s.