Perhaps, one personal reason why I photograph, is because I live with a constant feeling of loneliness. I do have the tendency to be quite introvert, but I am not the melancholic type, don’t get me wrong. I would like to consider myself as rather cheery, but still, the loneliness comes. Photography, I find, has a way of positively and proactively reveling in solitude. I love photographing – and I love the moments that surround it; the walking, the observing, the feeling, and the fulfillment that comes from the solitude of working with the image later. I love finding a subject and engaging in this meeting of two worlds; My world, and the person’s world. I shoot digitally, however for my personal work I prefer to shoot with film. I find that analogue has a way of truly honoring life. It respects the value of each second’s passing – there is no way to turn back. And so, the image captured on celluloid stands as a sole visceral relic of the past, the only one other than your own memory. The magic of film lives – and this is evident too, after processing the image – when I learn something more about that moment; a detail I may have not noticed: the expression of someone in the background, a shadow, suddenly life from the past reveals itself in our present. I am always in awe of this. Besides what I said about solitude, I will say in the same breath, that it is this loneliness that pushes me to reach out and meet the world. With street or documentary photography, you encounter incredible moments that you share with strangers. For seconds, or minutes, when I photograph a stranger, or a new friend, I am allowed a glimpse into their life, and they perhaps glimpse into mine; a trusting, fleeting friendship is forged. So in this way, photography for me, is a balanced marriage between solitude and companionship. This companionship may be with the subject, or with the viewer. Photography is a way of plugging into my humanity, and proving my own humane existence to the world. There is an island off the coast of Kenya called Lamu. There are many donkeys there, countless cats and there is only one car. It is at least a 24 hour journey by road from Nairobi, and a flight there is usually US$300. I am yet to pin-point why, but most of my personal projects revolve around this island: a long-term documentary I have begun working on, a fiction film I would like to make there next year, and of course, a body of photography work that I have been building on.

School Boys

I will start with this image (above). This photograph on a personal level, reminds me of a great time of strength, a time when my personal and professional life converged. My heart was breaking, and as it is often with heart-break – you push yourself into making bigger strides. I gathered all the money I could find, bought all the film I could buy, and I left to Lamu to whimsically begin research on a documentary film idea I had. My budget was tight, but life has to happen, and so for days I would walk, photograph, and interview people. This photograph I took when I had stopped for a Fanta. The image reminds me of the feeling of being inside, and longing to be outside in the world. Photography for me sometimes is only about me longing to be somewhere else, or be someone else. And this image, yoh! I just wish I was that boy running and splashing my foot into those puddles! Aesthetically, I love this image because I see motion in the boy’s stride. And I love their sharp reflections in the puddles. Also to be frank, I love seeing school children, especially in Kenya, where education is sadly a privilege and not a given.

The Forgotten Teaspoon and The Cloudy Day Outside

Well. I am not sure how to articulate why I like it. The only two words that come to mind are ‘forgotten’ and ‘overlooked’.

Ali

I met Ali as I circumambulated Lamu. We talked, and walked and he took me up to the sand dunes. There you can see the Channel below you, and the Island of Manda opposite. Lamu – specifically this area, Shela – has seen a surge of gentrification by wealthy foreigners. Once its surroundings were only mere sand dunes and mangroves. Now houses are cropping up and changing the social and environmental fabric of the Lamu Archipelago. I respect Ali and I appreciate the kindness that he showed me.

Ayako

I took this image with a disposable underwater camera. It is of my lovely, dear cousin, Ayako.

James

I took this photograph a week ago in James’s small Kiosk in Lamu. My colleague and I trekked for ages to find James, though we had never met him. I do not have much to say about this photograph, except that I am struck by how the two males seem to be unaware of each other. Yet they have a very similar expression. It is almost like I merged the two images.

Follow Philippa on Twitter @ONETHIRSTYFISH.

Cécile Mella (remember her portraits of the Cape Town ad world) will be showing her photography series ‘Dreamland’ in Montpellier, France this month (at the Galerie Saint Ravy). Come through if you’re in the area.

The ever-well-informed African Art in London announced this week that Yinka Shonibare’s contribution to the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square — Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010) — has been bought for the nation after a successful campaign by National Maritime Museum and the Art Fund:

The artist calls a ship in a bottle ‘an object of wonder’ and this work has certainly captivated crowds, fast becoming a favourite among Londoners and visitors alike. In common with the original, it has 80 cannon and 37 sails set as on the day of battle. Materials include oak, hardwood, brass, twine and canvas. Its richly patterned textiles – used for the sails – are of course a departure from the original. These were inspired by Indonesian batik, mass-produced by Dutch traders and sold in West Africa. Today these designs are associated with African dress and identity. [Remember Neelika's post on the excitement about 'African fabric'.] In such ways, the piece celebrates the cultural richness and ethnic diversity of the United Kingdom, and also initiates conversations about this country’s past as a colonial power. (Art Fund)

Shonibare’s piece is undoubtedly one of the more interesting contributions to the plinth, a recent space for public art, and one proclaimed by the media as the most significant. I’m always unclear how much an artist, if they remain committed to structural change, should participate in these institutions, or accept institutional plaudits (Shonibare is an MBE). But it is reassuring that the nation has bought a treasure which signals such ambivalence about the status of the nation itself.

We were disappointed to discover this, but not entirely surprised. Africa is not the only omission (Central Asia and Australia are also missing), but it is the most conspicuous, and it casts doubt on the initiative’s stated aim of challenging “Western-centric” views. How can such a large and dynamic part of the world remain invisible—must it remain invisible—in the midst of this rapidly shifting institutional landscape? Given the efflorescence of exciting new initiatives in Africa, doesn’t a map that leaves most of the continent out start to look rather retrogressive?

Many reasons for the exclusion of most of Africa from this and other “global” initiatives are not difficult to divine. They are connected with the motivations of banks and bankers, and, by extension, wealthy patrons, collectors, and dealers, whose relationships to the museum world have always been shaped by broader economic trends. We have already grown accustomed to the idea of a Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (or, closer to home, the BMW Guggenheim Lab). Money from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and more recently, a handful of countries in North Africa has created new flows, deepening collections in European and North American museums for some time. And no one, at least not anyone with any practical experience of fundraising, is going to criticize a museum or other arts institution for adapting its agendas, un tant soit peu, to fit those of its financial backers.

Yet the concentrations of wealth that are connected with both museum boards and the high-ticket art sales that the art market chases—and that are associated, precisely, with a Swiss bank’s clients—are few and far between in Africa. South of the Sahara, they can be found with critical mass primarily in South Africa, Angola, DRC, and Nigeria, where they remain closely tied to the oil, diamond, and other mining industries and, in South Africa in particular, the power of white elites. It seems a safe assumption that no American museum would be content to forge a “global” partnership with African artists, curators, and institutions that was brokered exclusively by white South Africans, or that showcased work by white South African artists—although some have come perilously close. We recognize just how difficult these negotiations are. But surely these are the very negotiations that those wanting to cultivate “global art” as a category should be embracing rather than shying from?

This brings us to a second point. Rather than simply lamenting the conservatism of the museum world, or throwing up our hands at the narrowness of vision exemplified by programming that moves in lockstep with “global” capital, we would, above all, urge our colleagues at the Guggenheim and elsewhere in the American museum world to consider the opportunities they are losing when they leave most of Africa off their map, and to reflect more seriously on whether, and where, art institutions have room to challenge the status quo.

When one considers the contemporary art scene in Africa, the lost opportunities are extraordinary. In our own recent writing about art institutions on the continent, which has focused on photography, we have underscored the intensity of the creative scenes in many African cities, where, thanks to the inspired efforts of a rising generation of artists and activist curators, new institutions and initiatives are popping up daily. If one sticks to photography as a test case, there is a richness and diversity of events, projects, and platforms emerging that cannot be confined to a single city or country. Beyond Bamako, whose photography biennial has been a growing favorite with European curators since 1994, Harare and Cape Town both host exciting annual photography festivals. Dakar and Abidjan have both been important hubs for more transitory, but no less important, activity. Most recently, Addis Foto Fest, in Addis Ababa, has been added to the roster of influential gatherings, where photographers, artists, and curators meet to enter into precisely the kind of transnational and cross-cultural dialogue that the Guggenheim initiative, and others like it, want to invite. Cairo, Johannesburg, and Algiers are characterized by their own varied and thriving art scenes, which include inventive photographic scenes. In a moment that valorizes flow and the expansion of transnational networks, the interconnectedness of these cities with others on the continent is particularly crucial to note. This is one of many reasons for not subscribing to the North Africa/sub-Saharan Africa fracture, a legacy of both European colonization and racial ideologies. Linked to Algiers, through a series of artist-led exchanges, is Lubumbashi, where a promising photography festival has established itself.

It is instructive to contrast the Guggenheim’s approach with that of another recent initiative, which has placed a premium on African inclusion. In October of last year, a Nigerian bank, Guaranty Trust Bank, entered into an intriguing partnership with Tate Modern, which has created, and funded, a curatorial post (Curator International Art), a comprehensive acquisitions remit, and related programming dedicated entirely to increasing the presence of contemporary African art in that museum. Like Guggenheim/UBS Wealth Management, the Tate Modern/Guaranty Trust partnership has been imagined on a model of institutional networking and “knowledge exchange,” which is now very fashionable. Significant in the case of Tate was the appointment of a new curator (Curator International Art), who, according to the press release, will work not only to bring African art into Tate’s galleries in London, but also to “to broaden Tate’s international reach in Africa.” It is too soon to tell what will come of this initiative. But we find it promising that the new curator, Elvira Dyangani Ose, has focused on artists’ collectives—an increasingly hot topic that is, in fact, directly relevant to Africa, as Holland Cotter underscored in an article that appeared in the Times on Sunday (April 15, 2012). Indeed, Dyangani is the artistic director of the 2012 edition of the above-mentioned festival in Lubumbashi, where collectives have played an extremely significant role. Not only have collectives been of immense historic importance on the continent, but a new generation of artists is privileging the collective in order to ask its own questions about mapping, or re-mapping, the terrain of “global art” in the 21st century from a unique vantage point.

What we admire about so many of these initiatives that we and our colleagues are following in Africa is precisely that they have taken it upon themselves to analyze, query, and challenge “Western-centric” views of art practice and art history. Beyond this, they are challenging all of us to think more carefully about what is lost when the term “global” is selectively deployed to refer to the movement of capital rather than of creative energy or ideas. To miss out on the energy, and ideas, that are swirling around these initiatives in Africa, in a program that announces itself under the banner of breaking down barriers and expanding knowledge, would be at best a provincial move.

* The authors are writers, researchers, and independent curators who collaborate on projects with artists, photographers, and related institutions in Africa.

Much of my work is personal, experiential, and purely subjective. There is no urgent story that needs telling and the only truth in it is what I make up along the way. My trip to Addis Ababa was motivated by a simple desire to go some place about which I had very little knowledge and start the process of discovery from virtually zero. This series of street photographs is the result of my quest for the colour of Africa. People (who think Africa is a Country) ask me, “Why Ethiopia?!” Just before Christmas time in 2011, my wife used to live in Madrid and I was busy shooting all over India. We decided to meet at some place mid-way. A quick look at the world map suggested that Ethiopia was that place, and how fortuitous it was that Indians are welcomed with visa-on-arrival. That’s always a game changer. And so shortly thereafter, we landed at Bole International Airport without any plan other than to let one thing lead to another.

You can click through the whole Addis Ababa series here.

Each of Hugo’s projects has a text, and each of his photographs a title. The studio portraits of ‘the elderly, the blind and people with albinism’ are presented in what appears to be a grid. The text tells me I am supposed to feel ‘uncomfortable and immobilized by the subject’s gaze.’ However, I found that I was not.

I wondered — as I regarded these images of people in various modes of ‘disability’ and difference — in which of these categories Pieter Hugo (whose portrait is in the bottom right) would place himself.

According to the text accompanying the series ‘The Bereaved,’ the naming of dead people with bruised faces as well as the practice of naming people in Hugo’s other projects, is ‘a personal statement’ that challenges ‘the anonymity of AIDS statistics in South Africa’.

But that is not what these images and the identity tags do for me.

Instead, they make me aware that the carefully framed, often visually seductive photographs — resulting from a view ‘akin to familiar painting genres’ — do not give me any information about what and who is photographed, thus confirming images in my head about those who are HIV+.

Sometimes, however, Hugo’s work does challenge the realities that I suspect could be connected to those in the images. Is that maybe what the text is trying to tell me? As it is now, the words merely mythologize the images, telling me how special they are, disabling my own judgements of what is shown.

The statements accompanying the photographs took me by the hand, pushed me in directions not necessarily related to what I see.

They make me, as a fellow image producer, feel vulnerable, aware of the limitations of the image, the power of context in general, and, more specifically in this case, of the powerful hand of exhibition curators who shape the manner in which one’s work is seen by the public.

These questions are in the forefront of my mind because in May I will show a work I made in Uganda in the only modern art museum in Rwanda. Simultaneously, Hugo’s ‘Vestiges of a genocide’, made a decade after the Rwandan genocide, will be shown at the same venue. Lia Gieling, curator of the Musée des Arts in Nyanza (Rwanda), invited Hugo to show a selection of this Rwandan work. She told me that she didn’t understand the selection of photographs from this project shown in the retrospective in The Hague. These images show the remains of slaughtered children covered in white powder and a deserted interior. The Rwandan audience will see something very different, she added.

I plan to report back on how Rwandans will react to our work.

* Andrea Stultiens is a photographer.

I too once held these opinions, and had relocated to South Africa from Kenya drawn by the striking terrain, the possibility of anonymity, of going about on foot, and the allure of a Mediterranean sort of life. And yet, in one respect, Cape Town had seemed, even at the outset, an African, even a pan-African city; while walking along Long Street, the city center’s main artery, I was liable to hear spoken Wolof, kiSwahili, Somali, Xhosa.

The city’s beauty quickly became blurry because of the many proofs that Apartheid itself, rather than its legacy, remained in place. In restaurants and cafes, a three-tiered hierarchy endured: proprietors were white, the wait staff colored and the charwomen and busboys black. Over three and a half years, I vacillated between rejection of the words not an African city, and a sneaky sense that this summation was less glib than it sounded. And as I read Beautiful Ugly, South African academic Sarah Nuttall’s critique of the West’s fraught relationship to African art, I was struck by this title as a fitting description for Cape Town itself, a shorthand for its intricate, unsettling cultural aesthetics.

It wasn’t long before I gave up insisting that Cape Town was an African city and instead argued that it was a Creole one, like Santa Domingo, Basse Terre or Rio de Janeiro. Later, I revised this opinion also; sixty percent of its population may be coloured, but Cape Town’s past and its predilections render neat formulations like Creole city and European city equally hollow.

In Latin America and in the Antilles, the Creole was a social intermediary, an embodied middle ground and the object of both “European” and “African” fantasy and aspiration. Whereas Apartheid effectively decreolized South Africa’s colored community, and it became just one among many tribes, useful primarily as a social and geographic buffer between blacks and whites. In Cape Town time and identity politics have further diminished the Creole’s historic raison d’être, and he has been forcibly recast in the role of dacoit, of brute. As the Cape Town poet Rustum Kozain has said: to a large segment of the city, I am a thief; to another segment, I am a racist.

And Kozain’s eloquent claim does not even reckon with the status of blacks in the Western Cape. For a makwerekwere, a foreign black, Cape Town offers no natural constituency. I, on entering a restaurant, became invisible unless in the company of a white person. If, however, my companion happened to be white and female, I became not only visible, but a spectacle. The worst thus, of all worlds: utter oblivion or the stares of voyeurs.

“Reconciliation,” if it even occurred in Cape Town, has failed. For the present, what prevails, in a sort of uneasy social consensus, is a privileging of natural beauty over man-made sorts. Capetonians have consented to revere the mountain but will long disagree on whether straight hair is superior to kinky, or if kwaito trumps techno.

And even as a Eurocentric aesthetic continues to predominate, a frantic, rearguard mood has become apparent among the city’s whites. With every passing summer, Cape Town’s non-whites become more and more visible, assertive and numerous. It’s not difficult to envision the city as it appears through feverish eyes: a citadel under siege, a dwindling outpost of civilization. And there’s no doubt where the ultimate stand in defense of the old life will—must—be made: the slopes of Table Mountain. As one local told a newspaper reporter, “People have come to accept that you can be mugged in town or on the road but the mountain is somehow seen as sacrosanct. For me as a Buddhist it’s my temple, my soul food.”

* Olufemi Terry has written most recently about Afrobeats artists P Square, Cape Verde and Stuttgart. His essays and fiction have been published in Chimurenga, Gutter and Cityscapes. He lives in Germany. Photographer Marco Lachi has shown his work at MAXXI, the Contemporary Art Museum in Rome and Caja Madrid in Barcelona. He’s a participant in the “Documentary Platform” project, a visual archive of documentary photography focused on the Italian landscape. He lives in Italy. Terry and Lachi are working on the project “How does it feel…” (to be a book soon).

For over two decades, West African Muslims from the Murid Sufi Brotherhood come together at the annual Cheikh Amadou Bamba Day march in Harlem, New York. Scholar Zain Abdullah calls it “a major site where they redefine the boundaries of their African identities, cope with the stigma of blackness, and counteract an anti-Muslim backlash”. Mamadou Diouf (in his preface to ‘A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal’) considers Bamba’s message an “unfinished prophecy”. Above and below are photographs Marguerite Seger took during the parade in July 2010.*

* Marguerite Seger is a New York based photographer of Sri Lankan and French decent, born and raised in Sweden. Her photography, she writes, “is versatile yet with a strong personal style”. Seger has exhibited regularly the passed years both in solo and group shows. She describes her work as “urban, raw, yet romantic”, shooting anything from MMA fighters to jeans ads, music videos, boxers and short films. More of her photographs here and here.

Italian photographer Paolo Patrizi says about his work on the “Italos”:

I used landscape shots to capture the phenomenon of Nigerian prostitution in Italy. My photographs contain the signs left behind by cars, waiting times and customers’ transactions. What emerges is a sub-human condition these women live daily. Some appear as if tricked by the idea that one day their prostitution status will be made legal. I have tried to deliver the emotion and the atmosphere of the eerie places I visited, thus allowing the viewer a glimpse of the littered makeshift sex-camps [...] pits of dirt and abuse, shrines to the shortcomings of globalization.

You’ll find Patrizi’s full series here. (For more background on ‘The Italian-Nigerian Connection’: Orlando von Einsiedel’s documentary on the topic is informative: part I and II.)

News accounts recreating the Mutallab family’s history repeat the same tropes, marvelling at how the boy who came from privilege—from one of the richest and well-connected families in Nigeria, in fact—could have ended up as far from his father’s expectations for him as this. Wall Street Journal, like other venerable western news outlets, fell to speculation: when the “lives of the 70-year-old father and the 23-year-old son shows they were shaped by similar experiences and shared many traits, including a withdrawn seriousness and devotion to Islam,” why did one embrace the separation from suffering that capital accumulation permits, while the other developed a deep level of compassion for the poor, and for the afflictions of fellow Muslims in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan?

Rather than fall into the sort of pop-psychology that claims to sort out why the children of the well-off (Osama bin-Laden included) may find “radicalism” attractive, Daisy Rockwell’s “cheeky little volume” of paintings and minimalist essays, The Little Book of Terror, offers a series of “big-name, international rogues” as well as the small fry caught in a big net. But, as Sepia Mutiny reports, “the feeling of uneasiness comes not from these over-chronicled villain archetypes whose images we’ve all seen scattered over televisions a hundred times over.” Instead, that unease comes from the realization that “The State is…a makeup artist,” as Amitava Kumar writes in the introduction to the book: the theatre surrounding “the bad guys” portray the accused as the “shabbiest” of actors with the “worst lines.” But beyond the re-plays repeated on CNN, we also see that the State is skilled “at presenting us with people who come to us stripped of any sign of place or past”: this way, we only see terrorists and terror without a contextualising history.

Rockwell works from some of those highly publicised photographs for many of her paintings, giving the captured people a depth that photography and the State’s vision of them often robs. She writes, in an email correspondence, “I have been interested in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for some time. Looking through photos of him on the internet, it was almost hard to pick which one to work with because he looks kind of sad and lost in all of them.” Her fauve painter’s techniques capture the “ordinary teen” who sported jeans and T-shirts, track suits, headphones, and rode a red-and-blue motorbike too fast sometimes. Her painting also reveals a significant moment in the life of a young man: he has found himself in a location where, perhaps, his limited understanding of subjectivity intersects with power structures that had over-determined the fortunes of vast swathes of humanity. It is far more than he is ready to face. Here, in this photograph, Rockwell points out, “he seemed excited to model his new Nike hat, and perhaps excited to be in London.” In a way, he had too much understanding, but little wisdom or equanimity. “I felt like that interaction with Empire might have somehow informed his eventual decision to attempt to make himself into a human bomb.”

Foxhead Books, Rockwell’s publisher, calls her book “a secular missal.” But rather than a “compilation of piquant essays” and images, I think of Rockwell’s The Little Book of Terror as an eulogy to freedom, but also, an invitation to a meditation on compassion: in this collection of terrorists great and small, there are portraits of the unlikely, and the obvious (one may ask, faux-ironically, where the Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al might be).

On the cover, a couple with his and her pistols: hers, a dainty one barely larger than the tight ball of her fist; his, a lengthy-barrelled phallic affair. They pose together in a reverse of the pose that Princess Diana and Prince Charles did for their engagement photo: she before him, he with her arms around her hijab-covered shoulders. The intimacy of the danger they share is palpable, across time, medium, and the misunderstandings between us and them. Rockwell says (on Sepia Mutiny) that this is a portrait “based on a photograph of the young woman who allegedly suicide bombed the Moscow subway in 2010. Her name was Dzhanet Abdullayeva and she was seventeen years old. The photo was a self-portrait of her with her husband, who had earlier been killed by Russian forces.” Rockwell has a distinct memory of when she first came across the grainy photograph of them on the cover of the New York Times. She was “at a rest stop somewhere in Vermont. It’s the kind of grainy, low quality self-portrait people use on their Facebook pages. I couldn’t get it out of my head, which is usually how a painting starts for me.”

Rockwell’s paintings evoke memories of language primers found throughout South Asia, and “old Bollywood posters hand-painted by artists with a keen sense of the fantastic,” as Amitava Kumar writes. They also have the horror-attraction characteristic of the abstract expressionists and the fauves: in her portrait of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, though himself darkened in indigo and violet cloth, a field of fire-cracker brilliant flowers engulfs his shadowy figure, highlighting his estrangement. Then there is Charles Grainer and Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib torturers, “enjoying a pleasant moment”: their faces are inexplicably green, and England’s eyes sealed shut in the pleasure of that elusive moment. The caption accompanying John Walker Lindh describes him as “the ultimate foreign exchange student,” whose “Arabic is reportedly quite good.” Mohamed Mahmood Alessa had a fight with his mother before he left on a misguided mission: he wanted to take his beloved, Tuna Princess, with him. In the painting, he luxuriates in bed with her: she is generously furred, long of whisker, and large of eye, much like Alessa himself. We learn that his mother did not permit him to take the cat. Instead, he left with “a large bag full of candy from his parents’ deli,” which the FBI confiscated.

Rockwell has been writing for Chapati Mystery (my other fave blog, run by Manan Ahmed, aka Sepoy), using the pseudonym Lapata. “Lapata” in Hindi and Urdu can mean ‘anonymous’, but also references the idea of something that has ‘disappeared’. Rockwell writes, “A part of me also wanted to escape the legacy contained within my real name, I suppose, that of my grandfather, Norman Rockwell. I wanted to make art without the burden of expectations that come with that identity.”

I would also posit that she writes for those Others who have been disappeared—by the media, by the state, by the Global War on Terror. When I think of her grandfather’s portraits, beloved in diners throughout the Midwestern states of my drive-through American youth, I remember that his work, too, involved painting the fantastic—though his subject matter appeared to be hyper-real. Here, his granddaughter Daisy paints the hyper-real as scenes from a seemingly unlikely world, just so that we (who do not want to know this real) can comprehend the fantastical nature of the times in which we live.

Rockwell’s paintings will be part of faux-tourism pamphlet included with Kanishka Raja‘s installation Switzerland for Movie Stars at the Armory Show next weekend. Drop by and take a look at the Armory Show here.

Her work will also be shown in Beckett, MA. Join Loo Gallery in the Dreamaway Lodge for a delicious brunch opening on Sunday, March 11, 2012. The event is from 10:30 AM-3 PM.

Watch the book trailer here. And find more of Daisy Rockwell’s paintings here.