Why Is The Water Wet?

 

Video Art And The Decline of “(High)story”?

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

The Art Of Ephraim Ngatane and Lesego Moncho

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

Images sourced online.

Ulrike Meinhof Goes To Heaven

 

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.

A Reflection On Planned to Contain, Forced to Condense: Orlando East and the Making of Urban Black Modernity

A recent article titled: Planned to Contain, Forced to Condense: Orlando East and the Making of Urban Black Modernity penned by Molefi Ndlovu, is yet another astute analysis of a phenomenon which still haunts our precarious lives in the enclaves of social experimentation named townships.

These places still feel like concentration camps where capitalists enterprises could extract cheap labour while securely caging populations through proximity/distance morality.

There was time when I attempted to analyse the “shack” as structural interpretation of what I viewed as “corrugated steel boxes of de-privatised and denuded lives of black folks”.

And as these squatter camps emerged around mining areas in the form of “Baipei” self-locating households, the powers that be figured that creating a coloured region just before the white areas was deterrent to black urban influx.

This obviously created the animosity we still seem between most black people and their “coloured” brothers and sisters.

And through your text I now understand the extent to which social segregation was entrenched through town planning, enhancing visibility of those deemed “nearly white” to become buffer zones that can neutralise black revolt.

Reading your article now resuscitates some of my bitter sentiments about the continued impact of spatial segregation rationalised as cultured settlement of natives for the sole benefit and access of whites.

Molefi expose how architecture can carry the souls of a people - and suffice to say, the spirit of each place (township or location) was inevitably going to break through the normative grids and spill to overwhelm the infrastructure of poverty that kept black communities in enclosed spaces.

And as is the case with many of your literary works that read issues, objects, practices from an internationalist vantage point, I am now forced to re-evaluate my own analysis, or perhaps bolden and broaden their scope through my audio-visual practice.

“Baipei”, as an epitaph and monicker for various squatter camps seems a residual retaliation to the pre-arranged degradation to be encountered in townships. 

Baipei - Those Who Located Themselves have thus become a new incarnation of illegitimate residences, which are in turn heavily policed and criminalised and labelled as illegal.

The country is truly grappling with politicised geographies of land dispossession, and the rampant dislocation from locations have left a truly transitory generation, who seem rootless as they cannot fix roots within any of the reinventions of “locations” around apartheid spatial designs and demarcations.

The contested issue of “origins” still haunt me, because I still cannot understand why so many places along the Witwatersrand and the N12, going as far as Lichtenberg, communities trace their origins in “locations” once called Makweteng”.

Imagine the planned and organised rationale behind the dislocation of communities onto environmental landscapes known for mud and inhospitable soil for any cultivation; places like wetlands that are always cold in winter and soggy in summer.

Peter Sloterdijk’s Critic Of Cynical Reason comes to mind when further delving into Molefi’s analysis of ghettoised existence, providing a sweeping diagnosis of our current social decay muddled by naive ideologies based on “false consciousness” manufactured by mainstream think-tanks.

The now unmasked illusion that the township is our heritage forces us to rethink the simple deceptions that went to our collective fetishisation of squalor.

And this article poses sustained arguments reflecting on how our purported modernity at various stage of human evolution can mirror disillusionment and the political fragility of systems that constructed them.

The colonial powers saw it fit to do all manner of experiments on black communities, possibly to sedate their perceived disregard for western modernity.

Molefi views geography, architecture and spatial displacement not as political aftermaths, but as constructs meant to anchor and root social dynamics “into land” which later form political ideological lineages of the dispossessed versus the possessors.

His investigation is both intuitive and interrogative of the historiography of spatial

design in relation to South African township grids, how they influence psychological

imaginings and constraints; a dialogue with his partially Sowetan heritage, that unveils those hidden codes of domination etched into topographies.

***

Molefi speaks of a lifelong desire to discover a language that would insist of recognising Orlando as a microcosm of a vast modernist experiment entered around the mining economy.

This unequivocal claim could also resonate with persons from regions such as present day Merafong, or any township along the stretch of the N12, where mining industry capital invested vast resources to exploit black labour.

It was a design that constantly displaced black communities to suit radicalised economic priorities. And living in Khutsong and Kokosi or Wedela, one can observe vividly the similar spatial grid designed to plot the contemporary, yet “contained” Orlando Molefi analyses.

This spatial design applies to many townships clustered around mine-shafts and white affluent towns established for the sole purpose of white monopoly capital. 

 

From the earliest memories told by of elders in Kokosi in a documentary produced some years ago, the present township is testament and a result of forced removals from places once owned by black farming communities endowed with multiracial social layers and economic co-dependence.

Those targeted demolitions are what Molefi calls “designed beginnings” due to ”an absence produced by violence”; municipal violence through demolitions of histories and livelihood, violence of continual relocations to smudgy and often inhabitable landscapes in the periphery of white towns.

This legacy of segregationist spatial planning continues to this day, evident in many new residential developments designed around the same infrastructural seam of surveilled existence; where density is a structural condition blamed on ever growing urban, criminalised populations that require monitoring.

It therefore is commendable that, through an informed observation of past architectural forms from a contemporary vantage point, Molefi could yield such a analytically illuminating portrait of an Orlando East that seems to converge in organised symmetry into an eye slumped unto the earth; a vast township system that regulates and constitutes South African inter-personal interactions.

Planned to Contain, Forced to Condense: Orlando East and the Making of Urban Black Modernity - Molefi Ndlovu

 

Watered Down - A Kokosi Water Saga

The Merafong ( A Place Of Mine shafts) is the epicentre of South Africa’s gold mining activities which have taken place since the times of the Voortrekkers, who arrived in 1910 led by Danie Theron and Ferdinand Foch, Afrikaner commanders who battled the English and displaced the native people for a period spanning from the 1860’s to 1990’s.

It boast having the deepest mineshaft in the world, and has in the past being referred to as the Vaal Reef, a place where prospectors such as the Jones brothers discovered gold prior to the emergence of the other settler communities that settled on its plains.

The native home of the Barolong and Bakgatlha tribes, this region also experienced vast battles and is site for one of the most blatant dispossessions of livestock in the history of colonial usurpation of native property.

In colonial times, Deelkraal (where Kokosi is based) was a vast meadow where white settlers brought stolen native livestock to deal among themselves, while exercising their protracted land invasions in the form of farm allocations.

In recent years, the main mining towns of Carletonville and Fochville have seen the growing mining industry move towards technological automation, which has further displaced the black work force, which was exploitatively extracted from the homelands a century prior.

This thriving mining industry has never provided environmental accountability for the black communities of Kokosi and Khutsong townships, communities that have been adversely affected by its enterprises and sub-surface activities.

And recalling the recent water shortages within Merafong, a number of questions have arisen regarding the management of the municipality; which has seen debts soaring and ordinary communities living without clean water and adequate electricity.

One might as wow is it possible that in townships surrounded by eleven profiteering mining companies, mothers are running with buckets behind speeding trucks with filthy water for sale, in the face of the worst water crisis the Merafong region has experienced?

These communities from which much of the labour is drawn, has now a growing generation of young people who are disillusioned by prospects of entering the labour force, feeling despondent and fallen into trappings of social decay, while they languish feeling betrayed by those they voted into power.

Townships in these receding mining towns are becoming havens for illegal mining and cartels that lure youth into criminality and self destruction through narcotics; and this is exacerbated by the scourge of rising unemployment in regions such as Merafong.

This chapter in a series of documentary films aims to start a conversation around the pressing issues confronting the municipality.

Guided by these voices of the people who are confronting a devastating water crisis and electricity shortages, this documentary aims to deal extensively with how the current water crisis is part of a national crisis, in light of a global crisis of climate change.

This documentary is the record of a time of social crisis that will turn turbulent and violent in the coming months if there is no resolution or compromises that are reached.