Guy Tillim
Petros Village
Petros Village is situated in central Malawi, about 50 kilometres north of the capital Lilongwe. Rural, but not remote, its inhabitants rely on a local market to sell tobacco and beans for cash, and grow maize as a staple food.
The village takes its name from its chief, Petros James. In accordance with Chewa law he inherited the chieftainship not from his father, but from his uncle, his mother’s brother. The son of his sister Neri will inherit the title from Petros and take his name, just as Petros did from his uncle.
In February 2006, South Africa photographer Guy Tillim met Petros, who immediately invited him to spend a week on his farm, giving up his own bedroom for his guest.
And it is precisely this that pervades the pictures that Tillim took during that week: a sacred sense of warm hospitality, which is first and foremost generosity of spirit, unthinkable in city life.
Guy Tillim was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1962. He has received many awards for his work, including the 2005 Leica Oskar Barnack Award for his “Joburg” series documenting the life of Johannesburg’s inner city residents. He has had numerous exhibitions of his work, which has also been featured in several shows focusing on African art and photography, most recently at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, in August 2005; the International Center of Photography, New York, in March 2006; and Documenta 12, Kassel, in 2007 “Petros Village” was exhibited at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere during the 2006 edition of FOTOGRAFIA international festival in Rome. In 2006 Tillim has been awarded the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography by the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. His series Avenue Patrice Lumumba has shown at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and at FOAM_Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam. In 2009 he has been invited by the Rome Commission to portray the city of Rome and realised the project and the book Roma città di mezzo. In 2011 the project Petros Village was part of the exhibition about contemporary south african photographers “Figures and Fictions” at the V&A museum in London.
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