99 is a number symbolic of “truth” in township street lingo, and while many people in Kokosi know of EXT 99, they have no idea of the shocking truth of living with sewage and daily gunfire and violent rapes of young girls trapped in poverty’s remorseless grip.
Synopsis
In most townships, there always emerges an anomalous neighbourhood comprised of squatters and migrant workers (illegal or otherwise) seeking residence.
These places often carry names such as Baipei (Those Who Located Themselves), and EXT 99 is one such place composed of corrugated steel shacks and makeshift abodes desperately crafted by the homeless suing ramshackle tools and discarded materials.
Built from the desperation of a growing population of unemployed youths and backyard dwellers crowding inhospitable spaces around places of prospective employment and entrepreneurial efforts; 99 is an epitome of social injustice pitting people against a swampy existence in a place designated as a wetland.
But places like 99 tend to evolve into hellish neighborhoods, characterized by brutality and crime, coupled with unchecked poverty exacerbated by lack of service delivery by municipal authorities, who dread these neighborhoods.
Established n 1999, the number became synonymous with a sense of self-determination for which many black people were yearning.
Sadly, to date, the place that was also symbolic of the spirit of freedom embodied by dreams beyond the Y2K scare, remains still under-developed and further reduced to a haven for criminality and social decay.
This documentary is an exploration of Kokosi’s most infamous informal settlement.
It delves into the lives of those who cannot leave this sordid place for greener pastures; telling their stories of resilience in the face of squalor, and their continued neglect by powers that be, when faced with extremely degrading living conditions.
This film asks why are these people confined in this horrendous squatter camp, while being continually used as symbols of poverty in propagandist electioneering campaigns?
It is often said that history lingers and waits, to over time unfold through residues never arrives all at once; history occurs at moments when in the present, memory converges with the inner gaze of nostalgia and the chorus of trauma.
Art as never a mere footnote of history actively moulds it; therefore art remains not a supplementary cultural anecdote but a protagonist of evolving life.
Art transforms history and memory into not only an inheritance but a lived experience perpetually reimagining and redrafting itself into collective memories of people in realtime.
And as political entities longing for intimacy within a world that mould us, artists continue to craft impulses that convey the soul’s desire and burning urge for visibility.
Entranced by the violence of visibility, we, dissident artists are all drawn towards the light like moths in their masochistic performance and fatal attraction; yet the erratic and inevitable impulse urges us on to understand that history is ever occurring.
And as our contemporary times are troubled by remnants of unloved pasts, our art provides constellations of interpretations and meanings bringing to light other travellers in the shadows of history.
Those travellers, our ancestors and their imperilled memories are an undefeated and undying force to be recorded, not dormant nor passive; and through our art they are resurfacing and enduring not as recurrences but morphing residues grounded on the common theme of life.
Smudging canvases and projection surfaces with compositions that challenge the stability of the visual plane, the dissident artist emphasises the disruptive gestures of our collaged existences.
Here, art reorients us ,to moments buried within the hierarchical tombs of the mind, to lie forgotten and repressed until erupting in the present; providing a haunting pictorial universe of disturbing forces that continue to reshape the present psyche.
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And as currencies of political violence resonate through generations, transforming physical and cultural landscapes, how can art look away without inventing visions of the future already crippled by past and present brutalities?
What about those who live having survived perils and traumas that test morality and sanity; those who endure the vile residues of political spectacles?
As the fragility of survival woven into the catastrophes of our times escapes the logic of control; and it is up to us to challenge our sense of shared angst, allowing our past wounds to let light into our waning souls.
And in our absurd dialogue with memory and time, in an active game of shifting gazes, we will turn our sadness to humour and criticality of history’s intentions.
We will reshape the subtle optics of “recalling” and “listening” through nuanced shifts from clear-cut realities; marvelling at the beauty of anarchy and dissent against patronised cultural conventions.
With our invented and unbroken continuity of meanings, in a world saturated with images and the clamour of arbitrary noise; our art will require specific subordinating forces to rein in these tensions between what is incubated in the wombs of time.
Beyond propagandist fragments of the present; our art will exile our souls to dysfunctional spaces and imagined dystopia; evoking altered forms, ghosts moving across locations, listening to tunes haunting their chests.
Like vessels that bring humanity to proximity to its made terrors, our narratives must announce an inauguration of a larger mess of reality-definitions, those that includes the digital and spiritual.
We will move beyond the narrow margins of insulated ideals, we will grapple beyond the comfort of certainty and become detached from incoherence of systems, be but indebted to ourselves, and not participate in our erosion by reshaping ourselves around invisible expectations.
We will recognise that new connections are forged once entrenched prejudices are precluded from our imaginings of a new hour; and once we discover these discreet meanings evading our cluttered sights, our art will speak to the past with tongues that have tasted the future’s cold blood.
A Video Poem that observes water as a mesmeric entity, especially when contained.
A marvelling at the hypnotically edgy minuscule drops that drip into floods undulating, echoing a life fallen from celestial planes, for all that thrives upon the earth.
And as many reach unto the sky having crawled the dust and mud saturated in the blissful tears of clouds, Branches Like Wires Into The Sky emerges and imagines the darkness of midday, reconfiguring an austere perception of a bone dry tree; a symbol of decay within the dynamic yet familiar reach for light.
The word “history” came into being, because our events were told and written down thereafter. Now history is being recorded in images or video. Therefore from now on there is no more “History”, but only “Imagery” or “Videory”.
⁃ Nam June Paik, Binghamton Letter(1972)
“We live in an age where truth is constructed from images, not from facts.”
⁃ Simon Fujiwara
As we live in a post-narrative condition, not the end of storytelling but its overflow into new forms. Stories appear between what we choose and what chooses us, across screens and devices, beneath conscious thought.
Through video art, I undertake journeys into the limits of our perception and imagination, triggering images and ideas that, in turn, point towards new realities and the self-involved thoughts transformed into surreal playgrounds.
It is often said that a document is a record of fact-based information, traditionally in the form of words but more recently also as images such as photographs and moving images. The word “documentary,” meanwhile, has come to be used not only as an adjective meaning “factual” or “consisting of documents,” but also as a noun referring to a film expressing facts.
But my video poems are NOT fact based as much as they deal with the hyper- realities of the mind conjuring their self-destruction and re-assimilation in the real and natural realm. These video poems is are interplay between deliberation and intuition in art practice.
I begin first by dissecting and reassessing the unofficial history of imagery as found in sculptures, mosaics and buildings; unfolding those lesser-told layers of its vibrant evolutions until contemporary manifestations. Memories and their counter-memories are fragments upon which I construct visual interpretations not bound by traditional definitions or criteria for artistic representation, but used as a lens that looks at both personal and collective memories.
My video art therefore is a porous network of cultural dialogue and engagements, and it stems from an insane and very profound distrust of imagery, which in turn roused the need for orality and at times textualization of narratives in most of my projects. Through the use of “hijacked” images from popular culture, mainstream movies and publicity materials, the forensic-poetic work is affirmed by inner questions raging from faces of nameless objects and individuals reduced to symbols.
The underlying critical question is what the art can imply for life through suspension of genre-specific boundaries and redefining a new synthesis of the disciplines that explore the collective, the ephemeral, the occasional and yet psychotic engagement with a traumatising world. These video artworks are hence articulated as material testimonies to trauma, using cinema as the language of conflict , to expunge history from corruption.
Video art has always been to express different forms of resistance to dehumanization and interrogate the social fascination with memory erasure and contemplate the conditions of collective amnesia, where the marginalized and nameless, embrace their fluid identities through multiple possibilities of narratives.
This gelatine based pathway into dreams, recognizes the human in the abysmal, the timeless in the archival and the true in the alienated observations of light shed on obscurities. And “Human" here, is etymologically related to the word "humus," which is soil.
This cinematic art is far from representational or unambiguous. There are always ‘tipping points’, ambiguities and multiple meanings, less concerned with a concrete reproduction of reality than with “interpreting existence”, sometimes utilizing technical glitches as tools, and rewriting visual narrative paths in atypical ways.
Rather than follow predetermined paths, video art moves across shifting contours, layered fictions and shifting realities, lead us down unanticipated paths.
These appropriated manipulated images subjected to a series of physical alterations and even macabre that they portray, they have been penetrating deeper into the unconscious of technological society
Blending storytelling with critical and dissenting narratives, video art subverts the polarising structures shaping our understanding of the world, and, explores the anxieties provoked by the uncertainties and social injustices of our time.
Video art therefore embraces incompletion as a generative method for pushing inherited fragments and unresolved ideas into motion, juggling a paradoxical dynamic of gazing while being gazed at, offering sensorial testimony to the historical traumas, and the fragile and illusory nature of social systems we live in.
Video art thrives on glitches and errors that are treated not as failures but as methods. They create cracks where new meanings slip through, moments where the story branches unexpectedly into fault lines point to the politics of narrative: who gets to tell the story, who is written in, and what is left unsaid.
Within a contemporary visual climate in which images appear to precede reality, an era where reality is thought to be the outcome of images rather than images being an outcome of reality, how do archival images lay claim to representing truth?
Interweaving the personal and the collective, in other words, a holistic unfolding of memories and socio-cultural associations, video art is a contingent process of creating meaning of identity and collective biography.
My video art practice includes appropriating museum collection audio-visually and representing them in a new formulaic symbolism, allows for an ethical approach to retracing the traces of various voices and images that have been constructed and erased throughout history, bringing the repressed and overlooked to the forefront, inscribing them into the local context, thus opening a dialogue between time, place and history.
The archival artefacts alluded to include sound-based and silent works, yet within which sound is always present—sometimes heard, sometimes only imagined - yet retaining and relating to the partially obscured histories of human reality.
The resultant visual experiments recreate visual narratives that draw on stories that resonate with the current resurgence of discourse about archival truisms and heritage preservation. Furthermore they employ montage to juxtapose appropriated images, generating new meanings, offering a careful reflection on appropriation and collaboration, foregrounding the artist’s role as art historian, documentarist, and archivist.
This archives-based video art practice therefore operates at the intersection of cinema and historical research of heritage of absurd histories and rituals as varied as cinema screenings, psychoanalytic sessions, and experimental theatrical performances are model for exhibitions: they are mediated experiences by which to access worlds beyond the everyday and connects these emancipatory practices to anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements in the present.
Video art becomes the ever more refined messenger for a modern world that might be seen beyond appearances, it announces new orders of vision, it gives the future something more than an image, embracing the idea that everything we think we know is, to some degree, a constructed narrative.
First Published On: https://www.numenofstory.com/video-art-and-the-decline-of-high-story
In the four works (shown in this article) by renowned artist Ephraim Mojalefa Ngatane, born in Maseru and maturing in metropolis of Johannesburg, I observe an intricate connection and inter-generational dialogue between his works and the art of Taung born, Lesego Moncho.
The famine and maternal are the energies that radiate from each work by these South Africa’s unsung artists, whose art gestures vulnerability and resilient beauty often cluttered among the debris of broken identities and social memory.
Through an evolving visual language shaped by abstraction, intuition and interplay of materials, Ngatane’s critical strokes of expression embrace a subversion of the spectacle of poverty towards a record of resilient travail against politically prescribed fate.
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Lesego on the other hand, as a contemporary galleries and artist, continues to evolve his style, as his works feature have grown to feature urban and non-urban identities weaved through curvatures and geometric compositions mingling strokes of acrylics and oils.
His work possesses a darkly playfulness of colour and lines, rectangular and squared forms that mimic daily expression against the backdrop of the clutter of township life.
The township skylines, the cramped compactness of squatter camps insinuated as canvases within the canvas where beings struggle with life’s joys and perils.
Obscured and unsettling faces always seem in awe of their environment, merged with bursting colours of township squaller, carrying instinctive meanings of perhaps how these unknown and unidentified black bodies survive unknowability and obscurity.
This obscuration of their faces, these potently elemental figures frozen in time, becomes a method of questioning ones recognition of what is familiar, yet rousing nostalgia carried like fragments of a people’s memory along a journey towards dreams.
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With Ngatane’s probing studies of an “end of civilisation”, in his work, bodies also exist in a state of continued search for identity in world that constantly ascribes categories to all forms of being.
Wrapped in a sense of multiplicity, these figures are captured often in groupings that symbolise non-alone(ness), a phenomenon prevalent in black community life.
And this communality in strife and celebration, fixed in alchemical colour palates, Ngatane’s paintings, reminds us that light and colour are siblings vibrating in harmony to surges of consciousness.
Each painting observed seems to lodge something into minds of the beholders, causing a pause, and interval of contemplation.
Not a fleeting glance, but a gaze that leans into unspoken gestures and small declarations.
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These selected pieces together question whether there are some entanglements with the politics of dispossession as experienced by people of colour, that still haunts our distraught national conscience?
I answer in the affirmative, having interviewed Lesego about his inspirations and allegiance to documentary style abstraction, where the forms are cleaved form actual persons or found photographs and images discovered through research.
These artworks works invite viewers to probe the invisible within the recognisable, the reasons that emerge independently are in eternal conversation with the viewer’s own past experiences of the poverty of township life.
As the country grapples with gender-based violence and its states of conflict and violence on the female body, these works mark a departure from struggles for bodily agency and self-determination to a collective awareness of “not being alone is our sorrows”.
Through these works, Ngatane barters with lived and imagined experiences between his present and possible yet manifest future.
Lesego confirms that no much has changed in regards to the dispossession and incarcerational designs of black communal experiences.
And while both their art positions gender as an embodied field of erasure, unseen yet revealed as recurring historical crises, there is a celebration of resilience attributed to the maternal guardians of an impoverished people.
What happens when a body does not recall that drowning leads to death?
Can a body expire itself through the abrupt cessation of processes of breathing?
Aryan Kaganof’s Ulrike Meinhof Goes To Heaven, in response to these questions, treats water as a fluid cinematic projection space - that translucently blue shifting fluid, holding a figure in euphoric twists that could imply death by drowning.
The slowed undulations of fluids in “womb”, endow the figure a sudden and evolving non-being, an agility that seems lost yet restored as it is lost and restored, again and again in varied harmonies.
It is as though the artist inspects a body of water, and the immersed body itself as a site of agency; where the water is a consciousness in which the figure swims.
And we ask, which body is neutral in the exposure of another?
Could water return us towards perception of the imperceptible, a time before being where language was insufficient to contain the complexity of the experience?
The body here, is in a constant state of becoming, and when everything perishes or the body’s form vanishes, submersion undulates, symbolising the figure’s inseparability from the whole body of water.
Phillippa’s muffled voice gesturing towards non-verbal resonance, becomes an acoustic phenomenon in itself; questioning a hopeful resurrection of the “lost” self that could be drowning or swimming towards the void of time.
And this act of “giving breath” no room, exhalation as expulsion of the occupant of the body, is as a method of concealing oneself inwards thus transitioning to the heavenly plane - that which is beneath the waves of time.
The figure at core of the video poem’s enquiry, is treated as free of convention, as that which exist without its occupant soul, a formless constantly morphing entity; water itself as a space of radical vulnerability throughout this transformation and rebirth.
With Phillippa Yaa De Villiers’ rendtion of Kaganof's poem, recited to create as idiosynchratic orchestration of sound as a liberatory force; her digitally manipulated voice responds with a moving language to the visual poem, which, despite its inherent subjectivity, arouses a further mystification of “the self”.
Through that “self”, symbolised by the figure descending into the brink of consciousness; the poetry modulates the stigmatic occurrence of drowning and possible death (an embrace of the void) as entry to the heavenly.
And this haunting collective of image and unsettling sounds, the voice wrapped in mystery, this gurgling fluid entwined with splashes suspended with moments of the figure’s weightlessness; these are the core of euphoria of a purported heavenly entrance to the unknowable.
