Grande Hotel, Beira, Mozambique

"Guy Tillim is one of the most important artists working with photography in South Africa today. His documentary projects are of visual and historical strength, and create testimonies to the social conflict and inequalities prevailing in South Africa.
This group of photographs is part of a series entitled Avenue Patrice Lumumba. Taken by the artist in five African countries ―, Angola, Benin, Congo, Ghana, Mozambique ―, two of them are former Portuguese colonies. The artist states: ‘How strange that modernism, which eschewed monument and past for nature and future, should carry such memory so well. […] In the frail of this strange and beautiful hybrid landscape struggling to contain the calamities of the past fifty years, there is an indisputably African identity. This is my embrace of it.’"