Tillim’s latest series of photographic images, taken in Libreville, the capital of Gabon, in 2012, draws on the formal and aesthetic concerns of his Second Nature series, as well as the ongoing interest in power and ideology in Africa that informed his Avenue Patrice Lumumba and Congo Democratic series.
Here, Tillim considers the construct of our perception of space in a city landscape, situated amidst the realities of an African capital and, inevitably, described through the prism of Africa’s colonial past. The irony of the name of the city, with its complicated relationship to autocracy and democracy, permeates Tillim’s images of this urban landscape, as do the markers of power that recur throughout his work.