Outeniqua I: Hansie Cronje (it’s just not cricket/ in a moment of stupidity and weakness my whole world turned dark)
2012
Raw photo credit: Kelvin Saunders
Light jet print on Fuji crystal archive metallic paper
900 x 722 mm

Outeniqua is a photographic series in which De Swardt reimagines three spectres that roam the Outeniqua Mountains in his hometown of George in the Southern Cape: the match-fixing Afrikaans cricketer Hansie Cronje who fatally flew into the mountains in 2002, the indigenous Quagga equine which became extinct in 1883, and King George III, after whom the city of George was named in 1811, the year he was deemed 'unfit' to reign. Outeniqua, in Khoi etymology, means 'man laden with honey’.

Colonisation is demythologised in the photographs through De Swardt’s use of body collage, in which swarms of photographs from contemporary print media such as lifestyle, news, fashion, sport, and science magazines, as well as reproductions from medical and art history anthologies, surface upon the skin to mirror the protracted whiteness haunting the region. Through accumulation the collages concurrently represent confounding forms of agency against colonial interpellation and surveillance.

Outeniqua II: The Kwagga (the danger of lingering at a halfway house/ the event was a whisper, not a bang)
2012
Raw photo credit: Kelvin Saunders
Light jet print on Fuji crystal archive metallic paper
1000 x 744 mm

Outeniqua III: King George III (the tongue of malice may not paint my intentions in those colours she admires, nor the sycophant extoll me beyond what I deserve/ every man who does not agree with me is a traitor)
2012
Raw photo credit: Kelvin Saunders
Light jet print on Fuji crystal archive metallic paper
800 x 689 mm