Description
Foreward by Carol Berger.
Fabio Bucciarelli’s South Sudan: The Identity of the World’s Youngest Country provides a record of the human costs of war, and of the remarkable strength of peoples who face great challenges in their journey to build a new nation. There are also moments of joy and beauty.
To be a witness to the unfolding of history requires patience and focus. It is one thing to be present; it is another to create something tangible from moments of crisis, or repose, in the lives of others. There may be linguistic challenges and awkward attempts to adapt to unfamiliar social mores. Then there is the matter of logistics. How, in a country where there are few roads, can a photographer reach his destination? And what are the ethics of photographing people whose world is not your own?
The photographer may see his role as helping to bring more awareness to an unfolding tragedy. Or perhaps it is wiser to see the work of a photographer as merely showing respect for lived experience. The event witnessed and captured by the photographer, no more than a moment in time, may well have consequences for the subjects of the photograph for months, if not years, ahead. But those are other moments, still to be experienced in an unknown future. At its essence, the act of taking a picture acknowledges the commonality of lived experience.
Bucciarelli’s images were taken over a decade, from 2012 to 2022. Between those years, South Sudan experienced seismic changes. In 2011, after the end of the 23-year North-South civil war, independence from Sudan was achieved. But just two years later, in December 2013, the world’s youngest country descended into a civil war. In the years since the diverse peoples of South Sudan have retreated into ethnic enclaves. Well-armed, dominant groups prey on the less powerful for land and resources. Peace agreements have been brokered with the help of regional interests, but the terms of those agreements remain unfulfilled. Millions of South Sudanese are displaced inside the country, and millions more live as refugees in neighbouring states. [..].
Carol Berger is an anthropologist and a writer. She is the author of The Child Soldiers of Africa’s Red Army: The Role of Social Process and Routinised Violence in South Sudan’s Military (London: Routledge, 2022), and compiled and edited Jieng on the Moon (Cairo: Anglo-Egyptian Books, 2017), a collection of stories authored by writers in Rumbek, South Sudan. She lives in Cairo.
