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project description End of the World (Cape Point), 2004

Cape Point, at the southern tip of South Africa, was once believed to be the place where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. It is one of those places that reminds us of our transience. End of the World (Cape Point) is a visual echo of that exchange. At Cape Point, I sensed, in a moment of intense spiritual awareness, the meeting between mortality and immortality.

The end of the world, like a thief in the night, can come at any moment. It cannot be owned or known yet, paradoxically, it is solid, ever-present, for the end is included in ‘now and forever’. There can be no doubt that the end of anything has an attraction and beauty of its own; a calm inevitability, or the promise of renewal.

Wall (detail)
Mozambique
Lambda print on aluminium
80 x 60 cm
2002-2005


The first time I saw this building, on the road from Maputo to Xia-Xia, was at the end of 1996 on holiday with friends. As we drove past I was fascinated by the entrance flanked by majestic palm trees that spoke of past grandeur. Some years later, at the end of 2002, I went back and spent some time walking through these ruins contemplating parallel realities: a grand colonial past, whose ruins are now a home for the homeless. This bullet-ridden wall with its bricked up doorways is another kind of monument: to war, genocide, South African interference, desertion, radical change?